Minnu Mani: The story from Choimoola to Dhaka

A mass of state cricket association members, fans and media had assembled to welcome the off-spinning all-rounder at the airport in Karipur, 120 km from her home. By the time she reached home, past the curly hairpin bends and lush green woods slumbering in the rain, it was nearly morning the next day. “From that day, she has been kept busy. We haven’t even had time to see her properly. There is always a visitor, or there is someone who wants to see or felicitate her,” says mother Vasantha, in a purple housecoat with tulip prints.

The rush has disturbed the quietude of their four-room house, done in blush pink, overlooking a paddy field slushed by the monsoon’s fury. It’s where Minnu first played cricket with the boys of her locality in the summers when the soil was hard and the sun beat down mercilessly. Until Minnu began to train at the academy, her parents too had little knowledge of the game. “I still don’t know the rules fully. But I watch every game of hers so that I could see her,” says Vasantha,

At the verandah, a tarpaulin sheet is mounted to deflect the wind lashing the rain into the house. It is now the guest-overflow area, often crowded. A 100-metre-deep, 100-year-old well and tin-roofed cattle shed reveal the farming forebears. As does the herd of banana trees that flap its leaves in the breeze like a hand-fan and bends over the rain-barraged red-tile roof.

Minnu being handed her debut cap by her favourite player Smriti Mandhana (credit: BCCI)

The nearest neighbour is around half a kilometre to the west, all other sides are either paddy fields or cocoa and ginger groves. Most of them know each other, most of them belong to the same tribe of Kurichiyas, most of them are farmers, some moonlight as daily wagers in the Priyadarshini Coffee Plantations on the Edappadi Road too.

There are two paths, rather than roads, to reach the house. The shortest is from Ondayangadi, the nearest bus stop, a couple of kilometres from her house. From the stop, an untarred road that slopes steeply to the backyard of a house that breaks into a column of paddy fields, each rectangular plot divided by narrow ridges that require the nimble feet of a dancer to navigate in monsoon. The route from Choimoola is less adventurous though double the distance. There are no buses; the road is so tattered that auto-rickshaw drivers politely refuse trips even if promised double the rate; a scooter stutters by. But it takes you within half a kilometre from her house. A steep descent off the road lands you on the backyard of her house.

The difficult paths have not slowed the traffic to the 24-year-old’s house. The day after her debut, which her parents watched on her father’s phone, a financial services firm gifted a smart TV; a telephone and internet service provider handed out a free 5G internet connection, though even 3G signal wobbles. Every school, whether she has studied there or not, wants her to share her experience, some of the students have drawn pencil and charcoal portraits of her. She has a junction named after her on the sprawling Malayora Highway; she was driven round the town in an open-roof jeep. When there are no visitors, there would be relatives. An aunt of hers is in a Team India wind jacket; a younger cousin is fiddling with a Delhi Capitals cap.

The sudden public gaze had broken their peace. “We have seen so many people on our courtyard only during weddings or funerals,” says Vasantha. But they are gradually getting accustomed to the crowd and dialects. “We know they come here because they love her, they appreciate her achievement and the effort put in to reach this stage,” says Vasantha.

A loud thud on the thin, freshly mounted wood door snaps Minnu’s recess. There is a door bell of a crooning cuckoo, but there has been no electricity for 12 hours. “It’s usual in the monsoon. All it requires is a drizzle. There have been weeks when we had no electricity. Thankfully, it’s been just a night without power,” says Mani, with a matter-of-factness acquired from outliving natural disasters. He had spent all his childhood and early youth without electricity., or a roofed house, or half a room of his own.

He reluctantly opens the half-shut door and is greeted by a group of men, who identified themselves as members of the Scheduled Tribe Government Employees Union. One of them has a small gold-plated trophy in his hand, another is unfolding a silk shawl to wrap around her. Minnu gathers herself and breaks into a warm, coy smile. Her father tightens his mundu, and pulls a few chairs to the verandah. Her mother hurries to the kitchen to brew coffee. Minnu goes through the same meet-greet-and-smile routine. A torrent of advice flows: “You should make your breaks count with the bat too. You know batsmen have more fans. You should develop the carrom ball.” She nods her head, pleasantly answers all their queries, even then most innocuous ones, and obliges selfies. As they bid goodbye, another group barges in. They are from the local parish to take her to a function in the church. She hurriedly dresses and leaves home, as another day passes breathlessly for Minnu.

*******

The size of her feat sunk in only when Minnu inaugurated a junction named after her on a soggy Saturday afternoon. Memories flooded her mind. “The whole journey flashed in front of my eyes. I felt emotional,” she says. She has stood countless times here – then Mysore Road Junction – waiting for a Kalpetta-bound bus in her four-fold home-to-stadium shuttle.

Minnu with her father Mani, mother Vasantha, and sister Mimitha. (Credit: Sandip G)

From home, it takes barely 40 km one way, but it required walking, often running, two km and then catching four buses, the first one from Ondayangadi to Mananthavady, from there to Kalpetta, then to Meenangadi and finally to Krishnagiri, where the academy stadium is. But before she stuffs her kit, she would help her mother in the kitchen, at times milk the cows or help her father in the field. “She wouldn’t listen even if we told her not to,” Mani says.

The neighbours remember a pony-tailed girl leaping over puddles of water and running through slopes with an unbroken smile to reach the bus stop in time. She was so athletic that she excelled in long jump and sprints before a teacher in the government school she studied, rerouted her to cricket. She, thus, is as much a product of her system as she is a design of fate. From plus-two, she moved to KCA’s residential academy in Thodupuzha in Idukki district. But until then, life was a hurdles race, Minnu pushing and pulling apart the obstacles. “Frankly, I didn’t have time to think about anything,” she admits.

Often she would not get a seat and had to squeeze in her cricket kit into the crowded bus. But nothing mattered in her drive to reach as far as possible in the sport she had chosen. “I didn’t set myself a specific ambition. My only goal was to work as hard as I could so that I could reach as far as I could. I had no time to even dream,” she says.

She did not have time to even brood over her failures either, or wonder about the road she had taken, or the one she has not .“There have been games where I did not pick a wicket, where I got out for a duck, but I am built in such a way that I don’t get into a negative mindset,” she says. Her father interrupts: “It’s the way in the hills, we will give our heart and soul into the things we like, without thinking of the result. Sometimes, it goes our way and sometimes it does not. But we move on and pick our lives from debris again.” As the countless battles the town has loved and lost.

*******

Just 200 m up the road from the Minnu Mani Junction is the Pazhassi Raja kavala (the local speak for junction), where the road splits into two. To the left is the road to Thalassery in the neighbouring Kannur district and to the right are Thirunelli and Mysore.

Both routes are symbolic of lost causes and the rebellious antecedents of the town. It’s believed that Pazhassi Raja, the warrior prince of the kingdom of Kottayam, hatched guerrilla wars with the help of Kurichiyas (the tribe Minnu too belongs to), expert bowmen, against the British East Company from the then dense jungles on the Mysore Road. The rebellion succeeded in curbing the British foray into his territory and inflicted, according to historians, heavy losses on the British. But a slew of betrayals and the superior military resources of the British saw him eventually cornered. There are conflicting accounts of his death. Some believe he committed suicide by swallowing a diamond ring after he was severely wounded. TH Baber, a civil servant at that time, establishes that he was murdered by a clerk Canara Menon.

Minnu’s house in Choimoola (Credit: Sandip G)

The locals trust the suicide version., and there is reminder of the prince in every corner of the town, from his tomb, a museum that preserves his weapons and costumes, a library and school named after him, and dozens of stores that has taken his name. Tune into ears, you could listen to exaggerated tales of how one’s great-great grandfather was in his army, or he has a sword with the royal insignia hidden in his house. Seven years after his death, the Kurichiyas spawned another uprising against the heartless taxation of the East India Company on the crops. It lasted barely two months, but the troops were so tenacious that the collector sought reinforcements from Srirangapatnam to snuff out the movement.

Like Pazhassi Raja, the locals keep another rebel close to their heart—Naxal Varghese, the firebrand Naxalite leader killed in a fake encounter in the Thirunelli Hills. He was born in a village 15km from Mananthavady and mobilised the ruthlessly exploited tribal peasants to revolt against the landlords. He successfully spearheaded the Pulpally Police Station Attack in 1968. However, after an ill-fated plan to bomb the Thirunelly Police Station, Varghese was killed in the fake encounter case in Kerala. All he has as a semi-memorial is Varghese paara (rock), deep in the Thirunelli forest where his body was found.

Forty years after his murder, the police officer who sanctioned his death was sentenced to life imprisonment, though the communist party later labelled Varghese a “criminal”. But for many, he is still their peruman (saviour), his name uttered with as much love as awe. The embers of his defiance have long been extinguished, but Varghese lurks invisibly like a ghost, inhabiting the consciousness of a certain generation. “My grandson wears Che Guevera t-shirts. I tell him about our own Che, the one and only Varghese. No one has influenced me in my youth as much as he had,” says seventy-year-old Karunan, stubbing out a half-smoked beedi.

The fiery past and the peaceful present of Mananthavady lie interlaced — struggling either to disentangle themselves or to thrust into each other — in the rubberized asphalt 200m-stretch from Minnu Murali Junction to Pazhassi Kavala.

*****

The rain gathers tempestuous force. Mani breaks into a bright smile and whispers: “The monsoon has been good so far (this year), the last few years, it was bad.” It’s a sowing season for paddy and a steady monsoon ensures that there is ample moisture on the field.

The rain was deficient in the monsoon last year — almost a 60 per cent deficit in the average rainfall —and subsequently the yield was poor. “Since the floods (in 2018), the monsoon has been erratic. It has rained when it was not required, and it has not rained when it needed to,” he says, scanning the field, some drowned in rainwater and some flaunting its green lustre.

Mani and his forefathers have been farmers for generations—so is most of his caste—and he says he takes care of the field like his baby. There have been times when the fields have betrayed him, when the yield has been so negligible that he had to take up odd jobs to keep the fire burning in the kitchen and fuel the cricketing ambitions of her daughter. But he never forsook the fields.

After Minnu fetched a Women’s Premier League contract for Rs 30 lakh, a relative asked him why he is bothering about the field. He could stop everything, give the two-acre land to lease or sell it, and relocate to Kozhikode, the nearest city to Mananthavady, a symbol of both affluence and ambition. “I will not go anywhere. I was born here and I will die here. So did my ancestors and so will I,” he insists.

He has seen the gradual beautification of the house from a palm-leaf thatched hut with un-plastered walls and just a room to its latest structure, with a proper roof, wall, tiled floors and additional rooms. “Maybe, we will modify the house again, but not leave this place,” he asserts.

So does Minnu. “The house is my identity, it made me and it is where I feel most comfortable,” she says. Her eyes wander into the fields.”All my best memories revolve around the field. The first time I played the game, the first time I realised I am good at this, then cutting the grass, sowing the seeds, and doing whatever my parents told me to. How can I leave this place?” she asks.

It was the field that sowed the first seeds of a dream. The dream would spread its branches, trench its roots and soar into the skies, bearing the fruits of her labour. Neither Minnu nor her parents want to leave the field that defines their existence.