Dedication

For Esther and Mariam, remembering Paul

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Lukose’s church

river and sea

waiting

summer, and then the rain

something barely remembered

the journey of dispossession

shadows painted over

snakes and fishes

fire drill

kidnapped in Casablanca

fairer far in may

returning to dust

cleft

ebbing

water birds

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Lukose’s church

My mother gave birth to me in a small room at the back of the house. The midwife was an old woman with a moustache, her hands gnarled but steady. She cut the cord with which mother and I had been linked with a flat heavy iron knife. It had no handle, and I would often look at it with dread, as it hung on the wall by two small holes inserted into nails. I had seen it cut off the heads of chickens when guests came, or at Christmas – a nonchalance of chopping which was repeated on raw mangoes, plantains, jackfruit. I had seen it, as a boy, being dipped into boiling water and taken in to my mother and her second son, so that the midwife could sever them too. Above the knife hung the fishing rods, and the long bamboo poles which mother used to knock down tamarind pods, guavas for us, and the raw mangoes she used in cooking.

I was the first son, and they named me after my paternal grandfather Lukose. My mother often told me that when I was born she was afraid, because she thought she had given birth to Grandfather – my eyes were clear and open, brown and unglazed. She said that I looked at her at the very moment of my birth and that there was a perfect understanding of her. I think it was her preoccupation with Grandfather and my resemblance to him that always created an intangible distance between us. She was always affectionate, but almost deferential, and she never held me close to her as she did my younger brother Behnan. It was not surprising then that when I took on ordainment and became a priest as my grandfather and his father, and his father before him had been, she began to call me Achen, Father – and it seemed the most natural thing that I should once more be severed, not by the spatulate kitchen knife, but by an equally blunt act of deference by mother.

I grew up by the River Pamba. It was broad and still, and its face was different from morning to evening. Kingfishers flew low across, their wings taking on the colours of sky, light and water. Across, on the other side were the green fields of paddy. And at the edge of the river were the swaying reed-like silhouettes of sugar cane which reflected themselves dark and ominous in the water. On our side of the river there were some large rocks, sand, and that beautiful wild plant which we call thotta vadi – touch-and-it-will-wilt. I spent many hot and lazy afternoons on the banks watching the kingfishers and waiting for mother to call.

I don’t know when it was that I received the calling. Perhaps it was that day when I felt the sun burn into my blood, and yet my head was filled with a cold and shattering sense of power. I shivered as I lay on the banks and felt that God was grey and cold and violent.

When I finally rose and went inside the house I saw the darkness and comfort no longer as shelter but somehow alien. I felt that the sun was forever in my blood, I was flooded with light, and yet there was the dreadful coldness, as if I would never again belong to the world of the living.

Mother said, ‘You had better eat some food. Don’t lie in the sun all afternoon. You should rest inside the house.’

We ate our meal in silence. Father never spoke, and while he was gentle with Mother, and always affectionate, he went about his duties as if language had never been made. I think it was because he managed alone the fields, the commerce, the workers. We were too young, and to Mother he never spoke about anything. He ate the food she cooked, and always seemed to delight in it, he said his prayers when all of us gathered in the evenings in a gentle monotone. I think he felt that Grandfather was still there. (I remember waking up one night and seeing Father staring at us as we slept on the mats. In the moonlight his face seemed strange, as if he were trying to possess us, understand us – what he did not dare do when we were awake. When he saw me awake, he turned his head.)

That evening, when we had eaten, Father gave me the Bible to read and what I found was a verse which said, I remember, ‘Thou hast known me from my mother’s womb.’ Perhaps that was when I knew I would serve God and His house. There was a church that was my right to serve, where Grandfather had served. I would go in apprentice to my father’s brother who now celebrated the Holy Eucharist there. He was an old man, venerated by all. I was nine years old. I told no one that day, though in some strange way my father understood that I would not after all engage in agriculture. He said it that very day, ‘I wanted to begin teaching you the accounts. I think Behnan can do that when he grows. Learn the psalms well.’

So I was left alone to dream by the side of the river, only appearing at evening to recite a psalm, as the family and servants knelt on the yellow, fraying mats.

When I went to study with Father’s brother, Malpan Andreyos, I was thirteen years old. Mother made a white cloak-like dress for me – not quite like a priest’s kuppayam or cope but similar enough. She stitched a small round cap of some bright black velvet. It felt warm and snug on my head, it was already a second skin. It was animal-like on my head and when I took it off at night I felt bare and uncomfortable. Mother did not cry, because she said that she had known of this moment from the time of my birth. Father held my hand for a moment – that unaccustomed gesture of affection shook me. His hands were cold, dry, without life almost and we were both embarrassed by my tears which fell on his thin fingers. Behnan was nowhere to be seen, though we heard his voice distantly from the coconut groves. I looked towards the river, as I departed with my maternal uncle. It was a cloudy day, the river looked black and the sugar-cane shivered against the water. The house too closed itself to me, the wooden latticework dropping from the roof like thin creepers were inward looking; the old Persian Cross reflected candlelight bleakly from the door – it was a carving of the cross through which I as a child loved to put my fingers, till one day they got stuck and Mother beat me, while Behnan laughed and stood on his head with delight. The shadows of the mango tree had fallen on the wall, the light was both golden and dull, a storm was on its way.

My mother’s brother held my hand, and accompanied me to Malpan’s house. This uncle was a tall man, and I found it difficult to walk, chained by his affection. Yet in him I saw both tenderness and authority and I loved him.

‘Eat well. Andreyos forgets sometimes when he is at his books.’

‘Will you come to see me often?’

‘Lukose, you know my work does not allow me much time. I will come after Lent.’

‘Will you bring me mangoes from your field?’

‘Is that all you want?’

‘Bring me a cat too, and mulberries.’

When we reached the Malpan’s house it was locked. I looked in through the barred window – the room was dark, musty, there was a table with a clean white cloth on it. After calling ‘Andreyos Accha!’ several times, my mother’s brother Mathappi went to the cottage near the gate. A woman came out, and looked at us for a minute before she went in again. While we waited, a man with a grizzled head and a thin bent body emerged.

‘Who is it?’

‘I have come with Lukose Achen’s grandson.’

‘So this is Andreyos Achen’s brother’s son. How he has grown! Well, Achen is not here. You know me – I look after the graves. You can sit in the church if you like, it is open. Andreyos Achen has gone to a marriage in the next village. He will be back before night.’

Mathappi Achen, as I called him, held my hand and the small bundle of clothes my mother had given me, and we went into the church. The church had been built by my grandfather in 1880; the date was written under the cross above the door. It said 1055. The light had changed again. We sat in the back, on a reed mat, having left our shoes outside. I looked at the altar where I would learn to serve, and felt a deep sense of dread. What mysteries were hidden here? I felt that I would die. The Malpan was a stranger to me – an ascetic, learned old man, saintly almost.

As Mathappi Achen and I sat there the setting sun entered through the western door. The light was everywhere. I could see nothing for the white light. I tried to rise but I was helpless. I prostrated myself forty times, till my knuckles were dark with dust. I knew at the end of it that the lamp hanging from the rafters was lit and that I would one day celebrate the sacrifice, here, in this small lime-washed church.

Mathappi Achen looked at me after my prayers were over and said, ‘I have a long journey over the water. My boatman will be impatient. Stay here – you are safe. Andreyos Achen knows you are to join him. I will go now.’

He kissed my brow, and held me by my shoulders. I said nothing.

When Andreyos Achen came back he looked tired and frail. He saw me watching the shadows thrown by the swinging, flickering lamp, touched my shoulder to guide me, saying nothing. I think he too felt that the priestly line would continue, it was necessary at least for Grandfather’s sake, but his face was stern, a sense of horror at the closeness he would have to enter into with a young boy.

He showed me to my room in silence. It was very small, having but one window and a narrow bed.

‘We will speak tomorrow.’

‘I am happy to be with you, Father.’

‘We will see. Have you brought your prayer books?’

‘I know them by heart.’

‘I will hear tomorrow.’

My bed was hard and narrow, but I fell asleep. I woke to the chiming of bells. It was barely dawn. I ran to the river and washed, listening to the birds as they called. When I went inside the small dark house of my uncle the priest, I found there was no food. I longed for the bitter black coffee, tinged with the flavour of wood smoke that my mother made for us. For a moment I thought, ‘The old priest hasn’t spoken to me, I can still go back.’ I saw the little bridge over the Pamba that separated the two hamlets, saw myself running over it, never to return to the church built in 1055 of the Malayalam era. I would marry, Father would build a house for me, I would walk in the rice fields and the slopes of tapioca and pepper that were mine.

Then I smelt the frankincense. It was bitter and fragrant and came to me from the windows of the church. I heard the priest call out ‘Kyrie Eleison’, Lord have mercy, and I went to join him. He was dressed in robes of gold, his feet shod in red velvet shoes. The church was empty as I kissed the steps and the pillars of the altar. He blessed me with his handcross, and I became like him, a servant, eager to see God, hardly ever succeeding in my desire, yet every day crying out to the people so that by standing at attention they would understand his revelation. At the moment, neither church nor priest, nor the world even, had significance and that was the truth.

river and sea

Leelamma had come with me to the station to meet Job. He was a short thin man, dark, with black large eyes. I recognised him at once from the photographs he had sent me. He dropped his suitcases and with no sign of diffidence he held my hands and said, ‘It’s you. At last.’ I was faintly embarrassed, and tried to pull out of his entrance. Suppressing laughter, Leelamma turned away.

Job was Father’s brother. He had been studying architecture in Italy as a young man, when he had met Marcella and married her. Grandfather and Grandmother were upset; there followed the usual tirades and threats of disinheritance, but Job would neither return nor leave the ‘Englishkarti’ as his mother called Marcella. There were no children, another reason for Grandmother’s continuous diatribes.

I was born to Father and Mother when they were very young. Mother had been sixteen and Father barely twenty years old. She was a lovely woman, my mother. I still remember her the day before she died. I was seven years old. Her name was Rahael. We used to live in a large old house. There were wooden walls and ceilings, courtyards, old trees and older furniture. Grandfather, whom we called Appacha, spent most of his time poring over palm-leaf manuscripts with hieroglyphics which he said explained our family genealogy for eighteen generations. His friend Thoma used to laugh at him – ‘Why do you need a genealogy? Can’t you see your nose?’

Mother tied her hair in a knot and always went barefoot. Her feet were long and once I walked into the room where Father kept his account books. She was sitting on his chair. I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. I had never seen them together alone, Grandmother was always with them. The idea that they slept side by side would have stunned me at that age. I always slept close to Mother. Father slept alone. I had never before seen them together like this. I stared at them, feeling waves of anger and jealousy. They laughed and called out to me, but I ran away to the river. I sat on the steps and I cried till Yohan, my father’s elder brother’s son, found me and took me to my grandmother. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked, holding me against her soft large bosom, where I could see the speck of gold which was her marriage locket.

‘Father and Mother are alone together without me.’ Grandmother laughed and said, ‘I will just call your mother. She has to grate coconuts for dinner.’

The next day my parents went for a wedding in the next village. It was called Mannar, and I’d always loved going there. The school had a heavy bronze bell, and the steps to the church were whitewashed. The river was green, covered with lilac water-hyacinths, and the boats had to fight their way through the root tresses of these water weeds. There was a storm that evening, and my parents never returned. I never saw them again, though they were brought home. I sat on the back steps of the old house and looked deep into the centres of the yellow canna flowers that my father had grown – wanton yellow with red fire lines. I looked inside the flowers for hours till I was dizzy and thought I would fall into their centres and drown.

So I grew up with Grandmother and all my cousins. After my father died, his father put away the lineage story into a shoe box and then took to visiting the river. He would stare at the water, at the strange and shifting reflections. Then he would come home and say nothing. Yohan’s father was always having to look after the family business: pepper. I grew up with the raw green beads of pepper, and the rain which fell on the twine and leaves. Yohan’s mother was a very gentle woman, but she never had time for me, having seven of her own. Leelamma and Yohan were older than me by five and three years each, but even so, they were my companions. Then when I was eighteen they got married and went to live in their own houses. Leelamma still came to visit us, but these visits were getting more and more infrequent. Her mother-in-law fell ill, there was too much work.

‘Leela, you’ve forgotten me.’

‘Anna, how can you say that?’

‘Why don’t you come home, then?’

‘How can I? I’m married now. People will think I’m unhappy if I keep coming home.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘You’ve seen Issac. What else could I be?’

‘Yohan never comes to see me, now that he’s built a house.’

‘Why don’t you go over, then?’

‘Mariam doesn’t like me. She leaves me in the outside rooms and goes away.’

‘That is right. You hang around Yohan too much. You’ve both grown up now.’

‘But I love him. We’ve always been friends.’

‘He’s married now. And he’s not your brother. You’re his father’s brother’s daughter. People talk.’

‘Won’t it ever be the same again?’

‘No.’

It was on that day that I wrote to Job, Father’s second brother. I sent him an old photograph of Father and Mother and a new one of myself. Twenty-one days later I got a reply. It was on a postcard, and it came from somewhere in Switzerland. He was there on business. Marcella was in Rome where they had a flat. His writing was small and cramped and he closed his letter with the words, ‘We have space. Stay with us.’

In my community, those who are far away always return. My grandmother’s grief lay in that Job, having married a foreigner, would never come back to her. ‘Even if it’s only to lie in the mud next to us, it would be enough, but now he’ll never come.’

I was surprised by Job’s invitation and showed it to Ammachi. She made me explain it to her. Then wiping her eyes with the edge of her gold-embossed shawl, she said, ‘Let him come here and take you.’

She seemed to have lost her rancour against Job’s attachment to the ‘Englishkarti.’ She was eighty-five years old now, her eyes blue grey with age. She had never recovered from the loss of my parents, and now that death came close, she wanted me to be settled. For her it seemed perfectly reasonable that Job should come, and that I should be in his care.

‘He is busy, and besides he’s only asked me for a holiday,’ I said, hesitatingly.

‘No. Job wants you to live with them.’

It was impossible arguing with Ammachi, so I let it rest. Soon after Job came home.

He was only thirty-seven years old, and looked like Yohan. For the ten days that he stayed in the ancestral house he quarrelled with Ammachi. It was terrible.

‘You didn’t bring the Madame?’

‘Marcella,’ Job said softly.

‘What kind of name is that? It’s not in the Bible.’

‘It’s a good name.’

‘She is not good, I know.’

‘You haven’t even met her.’

‘Cigarettes.’

‘She is very gifted. She is well-known in her country. Who cares what you think in this backwater.’

‘And her legs. Everyone in the street sees her legs.’

‘What about your mother? We all saw her breasts.’

‘She had children, she had once provided milk, she was ninety-five. How can there be shame then?’

‘My wife is an artist and a good one.’

‘Does she bring any money?’ Ammachi’s eyes were suddenly alert.

‘Mother, stop it. I’m going.’

‘Take Anna. After I go no one will give her rice.’

‘She has her inheritance.’

‘And what was it that fed her, clothed her and educated her for all these years?’

‘You Nazarenes, you followers of Yeshu Christu, have you never heard of love?’

‘What can I do? Abe controls the business. He says there is nothing for her.’

‘I’ll take her with me.’

Ammachi got up, and held Job’s hands and kissed them.

At the end of the month of June – ceaseless rain – Job and I left for Rome. I was so excited, I had dark shadows under my eyes from not sleeping for almost ten days. The whole village turned out to see us go, and anxious faces peered in at us when the taxi’s wheels churned in the deep sea sand. The river is on the east, the sea is close by, on the other side.

Father George, my teacher, looked in through the glass. He was desperately trying to say something.

‘Don’t forget your prayers, Anna,’ I finally heard, as I lowered the pane.

‘No, I won’t forget.’

‘Don’t forget your Malayalam. Have you taken the Gundert?’

Job asked, turning back to look at me, ‘What on earth is the Gundert? And I must buy you a box. You have a tin trunk? I didn’t even know they still existed.’

‘It’s a dictionary. The Gundert is an English–Malayalam dictionary. Father George is afraid I’ll forget to read and write the mother tongue.’

‘Write every week. Don’t forget the algebra,’ the old man shouted once more.

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Meet Father Agnello. A Catholic, but a good man. Holy.’

It started to rain. I saw Yohan. He was looking at Mariam and smiling. He looked towards me and waved. The taxi began to move, and then through a blur of tears, I saw Yohan open out a large black umbrella and Mariam stood close against him.

Marcella was wonderful. She was older than Job, and the love between them was so tangible I was forever surprised by it. Job stopped speaking Malayalam to me, and I was forced to learn Italian. My English was very good, because Father George had a degree in literature, in philosophy and in theology from Cambridge. He had been our parish priest for twenty years – unusual for our sect where priests were constantly transferred. It was he who had educated me, and by the time I was sixteen I had read almost everything that he had. The Russians were indecipherable to me, and Father said that I would have to wait till I was thirty before I could begin. I sometimes told Yohan what I read and he would look strangely at me. His eyes were narrow and black, and his cheekbones so sharp that they jutted through his skin.

‘You don’t even know how to cook.’

‘Shall I translate Aristotle’s Politics for you?’

‘That’s all very well. You had better marry soon, Anna. You have charm, but no beauty. Your father died too early. You can’t even cook or sew. You’re thin like your mother – she almost died when she gave birth to you.’

‘Yohan, why are you saying all this?’

‘I’m worried about you. And you should stop coming to see me. I’ll talk to Father about finding a match for you.’

How long ago all that seemed here in Rome. I realised as the years passed that love threatened us both. I understood, sitting under another kind of sun, why Yohan no longer acknowledged me.

Marcella never talked to me of marriage. She bought me an expensive camera almost as soon as I arrived.

‘We can’t afford to send you to the University. We want you to have the best, but university – no. We cannot afford. You’re too late to sculpt. The camera is good, you learn and sell. That is how you will live.’

So my future was carved out, and I spent those early months walking miles every day, in the cold breeze and the spring rain, learning to use a camera. My early photographs – now with Father George – were mainly of fountains and plazas, colonnades and arches. Marcella was not pleased.

‘Stupid tourist bitch,’ I heard her screaming to Job.

‘Marcella, she’s a child, from the country. Don’t speak like that.’

‘Let her hear what I think.’

Two years later I did a study of the Colosseum. The earth was deeply stenched with rain, weeds grew. I sent them to a German magazine which printed them at once. Celebration! Marcella was pleased at last. She gave me one of her odd, rare and brilliant smiles.

I wanted to go back home, but Job dissuaded me.

‘Things will not be the same. Ammachi is dead, what is there to go for?’

‘Yohan is there, and Leelamma.’

‘Yohan? That silent boy, Abe’s son? You want to see him?’

‘I want to hear the rain, I want to eat mangoes, sit by the river.’

‘You’re a fool. Nothing is the same ever. Ask Marcella for money if you want to go. I have none now.’

So I never went back. Sometimes in the dark green Roman street, ancient cobbles under my feet. I would think of the old house where I grew up. There were children, frogs, spiders, crows in the backyard, dark recesses, mangoes ripening in hay, and hens laying eggs in a chest of rice. I missed the high pitched Syrian chants from the village church, and the white cotton clothes edged with gold metallic thread that our women wore. One day I would go back to my ancient village where the wind brought to us the sound of the sea, and the hush of river water.

waiting

It was the dry bare-bones of a long summer. I walked in the dust, with the hot winds blowing around me, paper scrapping in the alleys, the city deserted in the glare of the afternoon sun. I walked to the old fort. It was green and cool, the grass growing wild, the moat a little murky, but glistening silver where it escaped the shadows of old mortar. I heard the strange guttural calls of water birds, and the summer became at once another. I was seventeen then. The memory became an incandescent bubble in which I lay, slothful.

I don’t know how long I had been lying in the shadows of the old peepal. Vulture droppings had made the tree alien, and I sensed the death in the old tree – its gnarled roots were exposed like the knees of crones, and its scabby trunk veered upward. A million tiny ants crawled out of a hole and marched in single file around and around its base.

I knew it was madness to stay, but the tentacles of time caught me – the fort so old and unknown, spoke to me in a hundred ways. It was dusk when I arose and saw to my surprise that I was not alone. The man was tall, with the narrow brown eyes that I had known once before, both laughter and arrogance in them. He was older by twenty years, and I felt a deep sense of dread.

‘So you still come here.’

‘Yes, sometimes – when it gets too hot.’

He pointed at the steps where we had sat, those long years ago in our childhood.

‘Do you remember the flies? They used to circle us,’ he said.

‘Kings and horses, I remember, but not the flies,’ I laughed, looking at him, forgetting the years in between.

We had sat on the steps many times with our hands locked together, afraid to make love because I was too young to ask, and he, old-fashioned, knew we were not destined to marry. I remembered the dreadful intensity of our eyes as they looked into each others’, the world sailing past, and yet beyond it – a laughter which would redeem us, would allow us to jump down and go walking barefoot over the ancient graves and the jagged ends of broken walls.

‘Why did you go away like that?’ I asked him.

‘You were too young for me. You understood nothing about me.’

‘Are you married now?’

He took out a smooth black wallet, and from it pictures of his large, lovely wife and his perfect children. They were American, all of them. So was he, down to his Reebok shoes and his wine-coloured tie.

‘I missed you,’ I said.

‘You should have written.’

‘You left no address.’

He held my hands again.

‘Give me a hug.’

It was so American, so casual and innocent, that I had to hold him. His body felt the same, but it was softer, older – a body which did not have the tautness of desire, but had known love and the gentleness of wife and children, safe house, a big golden dog to walk to the woods.

We disentangled, and he smiled at me. It began to rain, and we went our different ways without looking back. It was too late to ask him ‘What did you do?’ Nor did he question me: ‘What have you become?’ or ‘Do you still live in the same house?’ Perhaps it was because we understood that our worlds could not meet, that in our tenuous and placid worlds the other was only a shadow.

My work on Carson McCullers had come to a standstill. I had no way of deciphering the silences in the narratives. McCullers had lived the world I had known and felt as a child.

I had read her short stories over and over again, and all the poignancy of childhood, of unutterable desires, of loneliness and of wanting, came back to me. I had a McCullers complex, and it ran deep. I applied for a grant and went to a university town in America. No, I told myself, it’s not in the hope of seeing Karan again, it’s just a coincidence that I know he lives there too.

The city I lived in during that summer was large and open and cold. Brownstone buildings, no trees. Billboards. Greek cafes. Bookshops and an aquarium, with an eleven-dollar entrance fee where I would go when I was lonely to look at the fish, and be crushed in the whirlpool of people. It saved me from the alienation of the neutral city. Americans had children. I realised this when I went to the aquarium. I suppose, in my heart, I hoped that I would meet my childhood friend again, his beautiful wife with the yellow hair and the children who looked like his mother from Jullundar. Where else, living in a city which didn’t really respect children, would he take them?

Then one day, I saw them. It was exactly as I had imagined. He was carrying his daughter aloft on his shoulder, safe from the crowds; his wife and son were behind, carrying bags of popcorn and wild-coloured umbrellas. It was raining outside, their hair was shining with rain drops in the blue dark, the artificial underwater world of the aquarium.

‘Karan!’ I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I was good at subterfuge.

‘Elizabeth! Of course, meet my wife Gina, and these are my kids. What brings you here? Where are you staying?’

‘At the University.’

‘Here? You’re on a trip?’

‘I live here.’

His wife looked at me, and smiled, and held my hands, and said, ‘You must come for lunch on Sunday. It’s not often that Karan meets friends from India.’

‘I’d love to, but I’m leaving for home tomorrow, for Kerala. You remember my home country, Karan.’

‘Yes, I took Gina there soon after we were married – boat rides across the backwater and all that. But then it rained – like mad – and we could find nothing that she could eat except bananas. It’s wild rain forest, your homeland. I never imagined. I couldn’t cope with those spiders though. You’re leaving tomorrow? That’s a pity. We must keep in touch.’

He gave me his glossy visiting card, and his children, standing there, smiled and smiled at me, while his wife chattered about English studies and India. Neither of them had heard of McCullers and thought her a man. We walked together around the glass cases of the aquarium where large and well fed sharks swam in circles and in boredom, looking at us with dull-mirror eyes, wishing they were hungry and the sea was open.

Karan and I looked at each other when one circle around the alive and entombed fish was done, and the floodgates of memory opened again. The crowds separated us from his family.

‘You still love me, don’t you? I should have waited.’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ I said, wiping my tears, carefully, in case the colours smudged.

‘You’re not. You always were a terrible liar. You came here looking for me. This is your idea of revenge. Well, this time, it’s goodbye,’ and he strode away back to the waiting half circle on the other side of the exhibits.

It was raining again, as my taxi left the city down the dark and gleaming roads. I would be back in the Fall, I had a teaching fellowship in New York, but meanwhile I would accept Benjamin’s offer of marriage. I would go back to the old cardamom estate, and to my father’s brother who would ask for Benjamin on my family’s behalf, for me. Ben had waited too long.

* * *

Benjamin’s estate was next to ours, and our families had always planned that we should marry. He had waited for me – waited and waited, I should say – but I was so hopelessly in love with Karan that it seemed that I would never come out of it. But now I had. I felt I had. When I told my Uncle that I was ready to marry, he laughed and said, ‘You’re thirty. Who shall I ask?’

‘Benjamin,’ I said.

‘Benjamin? But he was married last summer when you went to America. Why did you go? He asked you to stay.’

‘Oh hell,’ I said, involuntarily. We don’t speak like that in front of our uncles.

‘Don’t be silly, Eli. You shouldn’t talk like that. We’ll find someone else. Lucky that you have property or else it would have been impossible, even if you were ten years younger which you’re not. We’ll find a boy who is already in the States or in the Gulf. I’ll talk to the broker.’

‘The broker?’

‘Yes, you just pay him a commission on the dowry you plan to give at betrothal. How much are you going to give – rather, what shall we say we are giving?’

‘Uncle, I’m going back to Delhi today. I don’t think I’ll marry this summer.’

‘You really are insane. I told my brother not to over-educate you. Just look at you. Dressed like a man. Pants. Even a belt. And your buttocks showing. Can’t you pull out your shirt at least. And lipstick. Someone will think you’ve gone mad. Well, go see your grandmother. She’s been waiting to see you. I can’t drive you out to the airport today. I have work on the plantation. You go tomorrow.’

Uncle was furious. He looked at me through narrow, cynical eyes, denigrated everything I was or had done. I fled to the small dark room with its low entrance, where Grandmother lay resting. It was a pretty room, though so shadowed I could hardly see her. The smell of paddy boiling in large urns came wafting in from outside. There were small square windows with delicate white cotton drapes. I could see the workers threshing the grain. Her bed was narrow, but made of dark glossy redwood with elaborate canework at the head where she was propped up reading her Bible. I sat on the bench near the window waiting for her to look up.

‘And Jesus wept,’ she said, ending the lesson.

‘Hello, Ammachi.’

‘Eli, so you’ve come. Not even a postcard. Benjamin wanted to invite you for his marriage, but we didn’t even have your address. How can you disappear like that?’

‘I left the address with Uncle,’ I said, smiling at her. Her collarbones stood out sharp and clear from the edges of the large clean white blouse she always wore.

‘He said he didn’t have it. The important thing is, you didn’t write. What have you been doing? Look at your hair. Like a hen’s tail. And no earrings. People in America seem as badly attired as people in Delhi. Have you eaten? We’ve made three kinds of fish for you. It’s so wonderful you’ve come back. We must find a boy for you … Your father’s left you enough money, thank God!’

‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I have to get some books from the house in Delhi, and then I’ll go back to America.’

‘You’re leaving tomorrow? But you’ve just arrived. You always lacked common sense. That’s why it’s so difficult to get you married off. Benjy was such a good man. He would have looked after you well. But what’s the use. A boy needs someone who can cook and clean, not someone who reads all the time.’

‘I’m thirty, I don’t need a boy. I have to go. I must go. I find the rain oppressive. My books are already damp, by tomorrow the gum holding them will have gone completely.’ I was almost weeping.

‘Rain, oppressive? But without rain things don’t grow. It’s true that there is no fish, in the rains the fish just disappear. Where do all the fish in the sea go? Ouseph says that it’s dangerous to fish. I’ve never been near the sea, so I won’t know. Eli, we were lucky today. We made three kinds of fish for you. Go and eat, you’re tired.’

‘I hate fish,’ I said stonily.

‘You’re just like your father. He was my favourite. Your uncle is not at all like him. I really had to talk your grandfather into giving your father that chunk of properly. Your uncle is still mad with me. And your grandfather kept saying, “But he’s a teacher. What’ll he do with money? He doesn’t know how to invest.” Anyway, you’re taken care of. But one thing, Eli, if another year goes by, no one will marry you. Oil your hair at least, it’s gone copper.’

‘I don’t want to marry, I want to study.’

‘But you’re thirty. How can you keep studying? Anyway, go and eat. I’m tired.’

She put her beautiful silver head on the pillow, and her creased soft face looked tired.

‘Come and see me before you go. I’ll give you a bottle of Kashayam. It’s made of gooseberries I cured ten years ago. It will make your blood flow.’

‘I wouldn’t touch it. The last concoction you gave me made my head swim.’ I bent to kiss her.

‘Thin-blooded, that’s why,’ she said, blessing me, with her dry papery old hands on my head and my cheeks.

I went out into the bright monsoon sunlight. After the rain, because the atmosphere is clean, the light is always strong.

Centipedes crawled out from beneath stones and locked in coitus. They looked like they would multiply at great speed and take over the land.

I looked at my thin flat stomach covered by my olive shirt. Would I have children? Was it important? Would I love a man again, and keep a house, and forget the eternity of waiting that I had just passed? I went in to eat my three kinds of fish for lunch.

summer, and then the rain

The mango trees were in bloom as he came home that summer. They splayed out over the roof of the house, and he knew that later, as it grew hotter, the fruit would hang green and heavy, and then become golden in the chests of dark teakwood.

His sister opened the door. When he looked at her he knew that the summers had passed without their knowing. His first remembrances were of her as a child – thin, with slanting black eyes, like all the women in his father’s family: the many aunts who had dominated his childhood. Her face had a strange beauty, translucent almost, but she did not smile at him.

‘What’s happened to you,’ she said. ‘You look sick.’

‘Came home to die, didn’t I tell you that. You never reply to any of my letters.’

She said nothing but took him into the large dark rooms of their ancient home. The taravat, as his mother called it, always reminded him of the long Biblical genealogies his father had made him read by candlelight. How tedious it had seemed, this preoccupation with ancestry, with sonhood, with naming. He was glad he had no property to congeal in inheritance, no child to take over the preoccupation of being an ‘old line’. Under this roof Ivan begat Yohan and Yohan begat John, and John begat Yohan and Yohan begat Yohanan, century after century with deliberate certainty. He thought of his sister, and the silence that followed her birth. At that very moment, when no bells clanged, and no sweets were made with jaggery and rice, he had resolved to end this torment of patrilineality once and for all. He would not marry.

At work his friends used to ask him, ‘How can you have such a name, “Ivan”?’

‘Ivan is my father’s name, Malayalam for John – may be Syrian, or Greek, who knows? – our ancestors were baptised by St Thomas, the disciple of Christ, and so we have the names of Jesus’ friends and followers.’

‘What is the unpronounceable name you hide in the initial V?’

He would say, ‘Vazhayil – the name of our house,’ and his terseness always surprised them.

He never wanted to share Vazhayil with anyone. The dark cool interiors filled often enough the labyrinths of his own memory. He remembered, too, with a certain detachment his father’s hands with their three fingers missing – chopped off by a neighbour’s kitchen knife in a mango orchard. The neighbour was his father’s brother’s son, Thoma. They still talked to one another, now that his father was dead, and curiously Ivan bore no grudge.

He put his bags on the bed, and listened for a moment to the creaking – a circular creaking – and asked what it was.

‘It’s the fan,’ said his sister from the kitchen. ‘Don’t you remember? Father had it put in in 1937.’

He looked up and saw it dangerously veering in a circular motion. Its flat blades were painted cream and black wires threaded across a wooden ceiling. A naked light bulb hung dangerously close, swinging in vicarious motion. Outside the crows were calling out near the kitchen. It was still morning.

‘How was the journey?’

‘It was hot, but it rained once. I couldn’t eat anything.’

At the table, as she put out the food for him, he looked at her closely. Her face was deeply lined, and on her hands the veins stood out, deep and thick and blue, like the outlines of bare trees. She poured out his tea. Why was it so thick, he wondered, like some viscous soup.

‘I made it just the way you like it,’ she said, stirring the tea leaves continuously.

He did not reply.

‘It’s Lent, isn’t it?’ he said, looking at what she had cooked, for there was no meat or fish.

‘For me, it’s always Lent.’

‘Oh God, no.’

‘I’ll cook for you if you like, but you will have to pay. You know my finances, I can hardly manage.’

‘Is that why you don’t eat, then?’

‘No, I like to keep the fasts. Now for me, every day is holy and every day I take the Eucharist.’

‘You must be the only one in the village then.’

‘The churches are always crowded. You left the faith. Joined the Communists? Father said you even had a membership card. Here things are the same. It’s you who changed … Eat now, I will ask Pappenchettan to buy fish from tomorrow.’

‘I can’t eat much, but it’s something I remember of our childhood. With tamarind?’

‘Yes.’

He slept the whole afternoon, and is body rested against the golden reed mat preserved from his mother’s time. The edges were frayed, but the softness was wonderful. He felt as if he were sleeping on fresh-smelling hay, and when he awoke it was dark and raining outside. Annama had lit the lamps, for the lights had gone, snapped by the storm. The fat brown beetles he remembered from his childhood were buzzing around the flames.

He went out onto the porch. His feet were bare and he could feel the gravel brought in from some ancient riverbed. Each stone was small and round, smooth, and yet harsh at the same time under his feet.

He walked down to the canal where the tributaries of rivers moved around the town like silver coiled snakes.

The lights of the street shone on the water and he stopped to light a beedi.

‘Ah! Ivan, is it you?’ It was his cousin.

‘Yes, I came this morning. How is Eliyamma?’

‘In good health. Let us walk together. I heard you were sick. Cancer. Is it true? You look much the same.’

‘Three months, they said.’

‘Well, we all have to go. When they put the earth on you, how will you care?’

‘Is there any room in the cemetery? I heard you could not buy land anymore.’

‘Oh, be buried with your father.’

‘No, we never got on. You know I hated him.’

‘That’s why you still talk to me. Those three fingers I took off him. I still dream about it. They lay in the corner of the field for quite some time. And it was all about a square of land smaller than a kerchief.’

‘Don’t think about it.’

‘Will I see you in church tomorrow?’

‘No, I hate the old priest. Why can’t he throw off his long beard, those black robes. Is he closer to Christ because of them?’

‘Still the same Ivan. Drink from the holy cup. Your disease will go.’

‘My father drank from it every Sunday and his fingers never grew.’

‘All right then. Tell Annama that I will send the man to fell the coconuts tomorrow.’

Ivan watched Thomas as he moved away into the darkness of the narrow lane. He was still burly at sixty-five, his legs showed the clear blue network of veins as he strode with his mundu hitched above his knees. His teeth, though betel-stained, were strong. There was something coarse about him, a little brutal, and yet his features, typical of all of them – hooked nose and broad brow – still had the old grace. Thoma had wanted to marry Ivan’s sister, but the old man their father, had thrashed him with a walking stick. Thoma was seventeen years old then – not likely to forget that thrashing.

Annama had told Ivan about it, many years later. She too had not married. Their father had died, and their mother wanted Anna at home with her. Ivan had tried to persuade Anna that she should allow him to arrange a marriage for her – some widower perhaps who would not object to her age. It was then that she told him the story of Father’s anger.

‘He shouted all day and all night. He ate nothing. He flung food off the table. Poured buckets of water on our beds so that we could not sleep. He would say again and again, ‘Filthy, filthy! Seven generations must pass before blood can be shared again. If he looks at you once more. I will finish him.’ I can’t forget Father saying all this. It was a sin to love Thoma. I could not commit it. But I cannot marry anyone, then.’

So the thrashing had taken place, and its retaliation. Annama never spoke to Thoma, but nevertheless he showed his love in many small ways. She never refused him, but it was understood that Jesus would judge them, and the silence between them was understood by their larger family. Ivan was sick of all that.

He would bang his fists on the table and shout.

‘Not Jesus. What do you mean, “Jesus is coming”. It’s the bomb … the bomb will come.’

‘Jesus will come. It says so in Revelation. Your Bible is still here. I’ll get it for you.’

He could see his Bible, childhood’s text – yellow, paper crackling, backbone frayed, faded leaves and flowers of a long gone summer still keeping place.

‘Annama, the disease will wipe me out, the bomb will wipe out the earth. Where is Jesus in all this? I’ve got a translation of Orwell’s 1984. Here, take it.’

‘Jesus will be there. I believe. The sheep will be separated from the goats.’

‘You be the sheep and I the goat?’

‘No, Ivan, you are a good man. You will not be sent away.’

‘Don’t forget, I want the cheapest coffin, and no lining. Mango wood will do, and no cross.’

‘Ivan, you will go as befits the status of Kochumathu’s son.’

There was no arguing with her. He would get up from the table. The pain beginning to sear him again had become a blinding preoccupation, an obsession, a desire for calm that would never be satisfied. In some strange way all that remained of his days in this old house in the ancestors’ village, were the memories of childhood overlapping with the pain that engulfed everything.

When the end came it was early in the morning. He saw the sun rise, and felt the air cool on his body. The trees were dark and soft with rain. The earth would be wet. He had a sudden longing to walk barefoot to the canal, and to look into the water for one last time. He heard Annama moving around – shuddering into wakefulness. He saw the purple orchids, the large white spider lilies, heard the fluttering of pigeons. And that was all.

something barely remembered

When Chako came to live in a small village in the hills of North Malabar, the people took to him at once. He was a tall man, thin, a little stooped, and his beard was so long it touched his chest. That was unusual in that area, where men were clean shaven. He found a place to stay in a household which consisted of a man called George, and his little daughter Anna. Chedathi, an old woman living in the outskirts of the village, could come to cook for them and wash clothes. The house was never dusted; it was always dark, littered with clothes, Anna’s books and papers, many stray cats and George Saar’s leather-covered account books. Strangely enough, there were no flies.

George Saar had never known Chako before, but while climbing down the slope from the church, where he spent every evening doing the accounts, he heard a slither behind him. Chako in his clean white mundu, hitched above his knees, umbrella under his arm, had slipped over some red gravel.

‘What is it, missed your step?’

‘I come from the paddy lands. Not used to this.’

‘Who do you want to meet?’

‘I’m a doctor, a green herbs man.’

‘You won’t get any custom here. Everyone makes their own medicines.’

‘No, no, I have come to collect them.’

‘Don’t you leave that to your assistants?’

‘I’m writing a book. Everyone in the West wants our knowledge, we must share our ancient texts. I’ve come to draw pictures of the plants, and then if I find a nice place to stay, I’ll do the writing here as well.’

George Saar took him to his house, and then almost at once asked Chako if he would like to live with them. Chako looked at the man. He had a strangely effeminate face, eyes very large and melancholic and a blue haze on his morning-razored face. It was a face that seemed to float in water, drowning in some unformed and congealing grief.

Chako said he would pay him two hundred rupees a month, which George Saar refused. He said, ‘It’s enough that you are a man of knowledge. And widely travelled. Not many people in our village can speak English, and we need some correspondence handled in a court case against a chemical company. A proper doctor is always useful. Which church do you belong to?’

‘Anglican.’

‘No harm in that, you can come to worship with us. We are Mar Thoma. The subscription is thirty rupees a year, and I’ll take that from you now.’

While George Saar took out the little yellow receipt, Chako looked around the house. He would have preferred to stay in a larger house, perhaps by himself. But then, for a start this would do. He put his small blue canvas bag on the bed, and was removing his broad-strapped Bata shoes when a cat suddenly jumped on his shoulder. It had been sitting unnoticed on the mosquito-net bar over the bed, and while it startled him, he was not averse to cats and put it gently down.

There was a small window at the side of the bed. The wall was made of thick brown teak wood, and from the window he could see acres of green banana trees. The leaves were thick, green, mottled with yellow in places, and the maroon cone flowers with their ivory nectar thick stalks pushed out from every one. It would be a good crop. A child’s head appeared at the window – an untidy child, but a pretty one. He noticed she was wearing red beads around her neck, and that her hair was cut very short. The long skirt did not match the blouse, for both were made from different cloths, different textures by perhaps different tailors.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Anna. Why are you sitting on my bed?’

‘I thought it was mine.’

‘Achennae! Achennae!’

The child ran screaming for her father.

He met her again at dinner time. George Saar, it seemed for all his penury, had one weakness, which was for candles. He had lit six, where two would have done. They made a bright warm glow, penumbras merging into each other. The child ate well, though a cat sat on her lap and made small quick movements with its paws every time she picked the fish on her plate. Sometimes she would look at Chako, and there was a strange darting awareness when she did that. He was surprised, because he was forty years old, and though he knew he was attractive to women, he had not expected a child to express these shadows of desire.

At night, as he slept near the window on the other side of the house, which overlooked a small rounded hill beyond which there was a narrow stream, he saw in a dream Anna and George. They had encircled him with bamboos, which were bare of leaves. They would not let him leave. He turned then before his eyes, into a magnificent golden snake – large, convoluted, flecked, yellow and tame. He woke to a sense of shame, the room in which he lay dark and heavy, the night sealing him in.

Anna brought him his coffee in the morning. They had a cow, it seemed, for the milk was thick and smelt of grass, insects, and he could almost see the softly ruminating cow. The fireflies, which at night had encrusted the wall and the windows, were now pale green worms. Looking at Anna he remembered the dream. With a child’s licence she got into his bed and put her arms around him, nuzzling his beard. He was frightened, repelled, and he pushed her.

‘I must start the day. Haven’t you got school?’

‘No, it’s the holidays. Can’t I come with you?’

‘Where?’

‘Father said you were going to look for herbs. I’ll show you where they grow.’

‘All right. I’ll be ready in an hour.’

When she had gone, he took a switch of palm leaves and swept out his room. He straightened the worn grey sheet on the bed, and hung his coloured sarong which he had slept in on a plastic rope above the bed. He washed on the verandah outside his room, where bronze vessels were kept filled with water. There were ants and small leaves floating in them, but it felt chill and clean.

‘Mother committed suicide you know. She hanged herself in the back room where you are sleeping.’

Annama was holding his hand as they walked through the dark glades of rubber. Blue birds flew toward the water. There was something strange about the light, a little ominous, an alienness – the trees rising into the sky, tall, gaunt, their leaves thick and almost black-green. Chako didn’t know what to say to the child.

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