Dear reader,

Almost everyone in the village disliked him, and a few of them, the ones who had once climbed his steps with a receipt book and a request for festival donations or a contribution to some party meeting, hated him with the kind of completeness usually reserved for tax collectors and weather. Children thought him a grump out of a Roald Dahl book, all angles and cold stares. His real name was PTA, and spelt out it was one of those Roman Catholic names that every tenth man in Thrissur, and apparently in Italy, seems to carry. But nobody used it; the whole village knew him by the nickname they had hung around his neck: No-Touch. This is not my translation of some Malayalam original. He was called, in plain English, No-Touch.

The story behind the name is not as funny as the name. Decades ago, when he was a busy officer at the Life Insurance Corporation, a job that promised a man could afford to be generous, a small delegation came asking for a donation towards a local festival. He was new to the village then, and people assumed a newcomer would want to buy a little goodwill, would loosen the strings of his purse to show he meant to belong. Instead he said, flatly, “No. Nothing doing. Not a paisa.”

As the group stood there, marooned in their own disappointment, he rose to his full height. He was very tall, frail, pale almost to translucence, with smooth hair and a smile that seemed to come from somewhere behind the glass. “From today,” he said, “I want nothing from any of you, and you will get nothing from me. No donations. Not even moral support for your events. Nothing.” The word “misanthrope” had not yet entered village currency, and in any case it would have undersold him. He asked nothing of anyone. He simply could not bear people, their noise, their nearness, the whole damp business of being among them. Some clever soul minted the butler-English name on the spot. It stuck before the delegation had reached the gate.

Years went by. His wife and children kept up the ordinary commerce of village life, though never on his behalf, never as his ambassadors. The village got used to him the way one gets used to a locked house at the end of a lane. For a while he merely existed for them. Then a new generation grew up, and even that small fact was mislaid.

And then something happened that everyone could have predicted, though no one could have predicted what it would do to him. No-Touch retired. He was still only in his late 50s. According to the local historians, of whom every village keeps a surplus, he managed the early emptiness well enough. He thought he might farm a little, until he discovered that his long friendship with idleness made a poor partner for the soil. He went to church more often than strict obligation required, but found too many people standing between himself and the man from Nazareth, and that put him off as well.

So he stayed indoors. He tried the radio, but did not know what to do with himself in the long stretches when it played neither film songs nor listeners’ letters. To his horror he understood that his days were now a problem to be got through. He lay in bed. He climbed to the terrace before his evening bath, oil shining on his frame, took one long survey of the world next door, came down, washed, and slept.

One evening on the terrace he noticed movement nearby. He looked closer. People. Half a dozen of them, men in mundu and shirt, one or two bare above the waist. He didn’t then know that this was a routine affair in the other world. So he looked harder, and was startled to find one of them looking straight back. He turned and walked away in something close to panic. He could not hold that gaze.

A few days later, driven up again by the small terrors of boredom, he heard laughter from the far corner and felt his temper rise, until he turned and realised, with an odd lurch, that they were laughing at something among themselves and not at him at all. He stood a moment longer and, for the first time in years, actually looked at them.

About a 100 metres from his roof, as the crow measures it, stood a small grocery shop that also served as the bus stop, beside the banyan tree marking the village’s mouth. Every forenoon men gathered there, the jobless and the hopeful-for-work alike, and depending on the season, the monsoon downpour or the white heat of summer, they played cards and kavadi with cowrie shells. The owner, Mr. P., who spoke as though his nose were permanently blocked and stammered and sneezed at every third sentence on account of his asthma, presided over a shifting court of friends in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s. People came and went; the games did not stop. When it rained the games paused until the rain did. They belonged to different faiths, these men, but they were bound together by one ecumenical sentiment: their dislike of No-Touch.

Naturally they were annoyed to find his figure surveying them from the roof one cloudy evening. They yanked the makeshift curtain across the shop’s crumbling veranda and shut him out. Next day they stared back. The day after, one of them made a gesture that needed no translation in any language.

Then one evening No-Touch stood on the roof, watching the men shake with laughter, hungry for it in a way he could not have named, and saw them turn towards him. A voice carried up. “What?” He said nothing; he simply stood. They looked away and returned to their game. He stayed. Only the goats and the chickens and the crows scattered across the yards gave him any notice, and soon they too lost interest.

Within a few days an umbrella appeared near the low wall on the far side of the road, beside the shop. Everyone knew who sheltered under it. Nobody said anything. This went on. The cats and goats took note, wandered up to investigate, found a man behind the umbrella, and announced him with a certain amount of noise.

A few days later, as he stood at his post, clouds piled up on the horizon and there was lightning, then thunder. The rain began. He was turning to go back inside when he heard what the historians insist sounded like an oracle. “Want to join us?” He did not bother to answer. He climbed over the wall and ran to the shop like a child, and finding that he had never acquired the social equipment for such a moment, said only: “Sorry”.

The thing was so unexpected, so unexplained, and somehow so heavy with everything unsaid, that Mr. P. sneezed and stammered in the same breath and the others put down their cards.

Then they laughed.

And PTA, after some hesitation, laughed with them.

Soon he was a fixture. He arrived each forenoon, grew genuinely good at cards, at the game they call Twenty-Eight above all, and became, by slow degrees, the financial adviser, the therapist, the confession box, the fixer and problem-solver for nearly everyone who passed through the shop.

Did they still call him No-Touch? I used to wonder about it.

Years later one of the villagers rang me, and somewhere in the conversation he said, almost in passing, that he had a piece of news to share. “Touch-mash is gone.” Mash (master), if the word is new to you, is the affectionate term used in Kerala for any respected elder, mentor, or father figure, whether or not he ever stood before a classroom. “Touch-mash was fun. We’ll miss him,” he said. I noticed at once the missing “No”, and noticed too that my friend spoke as though the “No” had never existed, as though the man had always and only been Touch-mash.

***

For a long time afterwards, dear reader, I kept turning the thing over: the breadth of these people’s idea of the world, their unfussy compassion, the way they made room for one another, how willing they were to forget an old slight and hand a man a second chance, or a third; and how PTA, for his part, was ready to bend mend the moment reality finally reached him.

I thought of them all again while reading Frontline’s new column, The Ethical Life, in which the philosopher Rajeev Bhargava has begun to map what he sees as a collapse of moral life in public, and to ask, among the many things, why so many of us, even the educated and the powerful, seem to have lost the knack of judging right from wrong. Their story felt like a microcosm of questions that Bhargava approaches at the scale of a macrocosm: how we judge people, how we understand right and wrong, how compassion survives disagreement, and how societies decide who belongs, who is forgiven, and who remains outside the circle.

The column is a great conversation starter on many things, ethics, morality, compassion, and above all, as No-Touch’s little village showed us, how we understand each other as humans.

Do read The Ethical Life. It is the sort of column that might give you the courage to walk the extra mile when it is genuinely needed, and the rarer courage to stop short of it when it is not.

Wishing you a lovely week ahead,

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor,Frontline