<h1>In This Hindu-Muslim Love Story, Death Renews Life</h1>
MUKKOM (Kozhikode), September 8:It’s very rarely that you come across a love story in which the lovers come together only after death has taken one of them, leaving one to carry on the memory of the other — and changing the life of an entire village. It’s very rarely that you come across Moideen and Kanchana — a story that’s almost two decades old but has now become public and captured the imagination of an entire state.
It’s a story that began so long ago, when the river Iruvanji was half a century younger, its banks a lot more greener, and the lone wooden canoe always bobbed on the water, the village lifeline. There was then the young Kanchana, teenaged daughter of a prominent local Hindu landlord, and there was Moideen, son of an equally prominent local Muslim landlord.
They went to the same school, often boarded the only village canoe together, mostly walked the same farm furrows home, but seldom talked to or looked at each other. And suddenly, they were in love — a Hindu and a Muslim, both from the area’s two big families, in ultra-conservative Kerala of the 1950s.
Moideen was asked to marry a girl that his family had decided on, he refused, got thrown out of home, even faced death threats from fundamentalists. Kanchana was taken off school, put under guard in her own sprawling joint family home, never allowed to go out alone again.
Moideen never married, wrote many Malayalam short stories, became a whole time social worker. Kanchana became a complete recluse in her home’s confines. She never married, either.
Time flowed with the Iruvanji, and the two hardly saw each other over the next 25 years — they kept in touch through a scribble or two that they rarely got smuggled across to each other. They decided to elope at one point, but could not. She,because the infamy would affect her unmarried younger sister’s prospects. He, because his father had just died and he couldn’t give his family, which had disowned him, another shock.
“The only words we spoke to each other was once when we somehow happened to be on the same village canoe again. That was more than 10 years after we had seen each other last,” Kanchana says, in a conversation with The Sunday Express.
The Iruvanji quietly flowed some more. It was soon 1982, she was 31, and he 34. Someone came to her home one evening to say the canoe had overturned on the Iruvanji, people have died. Days later, she heard one of them was Moideen, they had fished him out the third day.
Still confined at home, a shattered Kanchana tried to kill herself. “I tried at least six times, and relatives on watch foiled it everytime. After the last try, they had to put me in a hospital for many days. I tried to hang myself from the hospital roof, and failed again. I even tried putting away the sedatives so that I could take them all together and die, but they found out,” she says. By then, her family had nearly given up on her.
Word soon spread in the village, and she had a visitor one morning — Moideen’s mother. “She was a remarkable woman. Her son had died only a fortnight earlier and yet she came all the way to see me, despite everything. She asked me to live on so that I could finally go to her, as Moideen’s bride”. Kanchana did just that after leaving the hospital. Hindu bride of a Muslim husband — no one could object to a dead one.
Moideen’s mother asked her to take over everything her son had worked hard on all his short life, working for the deprived and the dispossessed. Before he died, Moideen had started a village institution for empowering destitute women, one probably way before its time. She also gave Kanchana her son’s library. She found that some books in it had the rare scribbles that she had managed to smuggle to him, tucked securely between the pages.
Moideen’s mother soon died. Kanchana was stubborn and her family could only give in, reluctantly. There wasn’t much of the ridicule and contempt she and Moideen faced all their lives in the village, once he died.
Pushing 67 years now, Kanchana now leads the BP Moideen Seva Mandir (BPMSM) that she founded in Mukkom, now no longer the village it once was. Over the last couple of decades, she had added on a rescue shelter for the homeless, a family counselling centre, a blood donors’ network linking villages, a good library, and a lot more; mostly using funds that villagers and friends gladly give her.
“I went through hell living on hope for the first 25 years after they found out about us, for him. And I lived on for the next 25 years, because of him. I will still go through anything for him, again,”’ says Kanchana. Like the Iruvanji.
Last edited by a moderator: