As Sweet as Honey

22




How strange it is to record what I saw and knew at ten. There was so much I learned later. The Puranas advised that women marry quickly. The very sensual nature of a woman’s body was feared, and I learned it was not just that a man’s thoughts might be, well, inflamed, but that it was the woman’s yearning that was the trouble. Without marriage, sex was merely for pleasure, experimental, thoughtless. With marriage, it was for offspring.

Maybe that was why their families gave some destitute widows to brothels. She could be either virginal or experienced; either way, her body, if not her soul, was ready to be bought, as maybe it had in marriage. Perhaps a family had given a dowry of a milch cow to the groom. When the groom died, they lost the cow and gained a widow. Other widows seemed so taken with the idea of purity, wearing white, changing saris throughout the day, white for white, bathing several times a day as well. There was also the custom of madi, a holy cleanliness which pervaded a person after a bath, and after fresh clothes were donned, lasting until prayers were completed.

My own grandmother wore green, and her hair was silvery, thin, and long. She did not move in with Auntie Pa but kept the house my grandfather built for her. She tended the gardens, supervised the servants, heard the weekly discourses by visiting pundits at the local temple. She played Parcheesi in the afternoons, swept out the stray goats from the kitchen, and put up sour dried mango pickle in Ali Baba jars. The idea of remarriage to her would be preposterous, if not scandalous, and to be honest, I could not picture it, either. She had married young, at fourteen, and took up residence with my grandfather at seventeen. In the pictures, she looks skinny, with wide eyes, next to my grandfather, who wears a suit, and in later ones would sport a Nehru cap.

Her children came quickly after she turned nineteen: Tharak; Pa; Nalani’s mother; my mother; Sanjay’s mother. I heard there might have been a child who had died at birth, a son, but this subject really was off limits for us. In my grandmother’s day there could not be an intercaste marriage without extreme consequences. Couples fled the island if they had money; some committed suicide. Some were killed in the name of family honor. As girls and boys went abroad for studies, they often chose their own partners. And of course, there had been a time right after independence when intercaste marriage was politically encouraged, but only for a short time.


Now it was month eight and a half. Soon, soon, said everyone. The monsoons would begin in September, but the intermittent rain had already begun. The cat played on the veranda, sometimes with string that I held above her quick paws. Sometimes she would meow silently, other times softly, or fiercely. She seemed to have forty different kinds of meows. I wondered if her heart opened like ours did to her, if she felt safer knowing her humans were inside, or if she felt that somehow, she was protecting her humans.

Meterling often met Simon for walks. At some point, hardly noticing, they began to speak of themselves.

Simon described the small garden he had in his London flat, and how the plants paid no attention to his ministering. Mostly, he put up his feet and read the Guardian.

“I was a regular twit growing up, you know. Mocking my elders, completely loafing off at school. I don’t know how I passed my A levels.”

He went on to Cambridge, and after obtaining a first in philosophy (“largely because I can memorize quickly, but the funny thing was, once I actually cracked open the books, and put pen to paper, it was as if I’d discovered a door I never knew existed”), he became an intern to a publisher’s associate. The firm published books on Italy. Once they did a book on coffee machines.

“Did you know Balzac was supposed to have consumed forty cups of coffee a day to keep writing?” he asked Meterling.

She smiled, and said, “I studied home science, learned a little economy, nursing, it was all included at my college. My father was brilliant, but I did not have that kind of ambition.”

“I can’t imagine you as being anything but.”

“That is because you are a kind man, Simon, and hardly know me.”


Her friends Chitra and Neela visited her too, bringing gifts. Chitra brought her twins, just two years old, and we played with them. They really were cute, their skin so soft, and they could be made to laugh so easily. All we had to do was cover our eyes and they would go off in a fit of giggles. Neela brought poems, and belly oil. With a twin each at our hips, Rasi and I stood at the gate of our compound, looking out. For a moment, I glimpsed my future, a young mother with a child.

“What do you want in your future, Meterling?” Simon asked her, a few days later.

“What an odd question. I want the baby to be safe, strong. I’ll always be protected here, with the family, but …”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit of those places I dreamed about as a girl. They are probably ordinary for you, but I’d like to see Paris, and Italy.”

“They are in no way ordinary. I will take you there.”

It was so simply said, with such quiet assurance, that Meterling saw it as a certainty, not a possibility. She was already in love with Simon. Now, they had somewhere to go.

They were walking in the Narati Gardens. It was Friday, and the grounds were still quiet. In the late afternoon, the weekenders would arrive. A light drizzle had just stopped; the rolling lawns were slightly wet. Their sandals made slight sounds as they walked. The rain had brought up the scent of the green around them, and the air felt washed. The baby kicked, and Meterling wondered if happiness could produce a premature birth. He seemed so eager to get out. She’d already shown us how his tiny foot pushed out at the skin, a sight that mesmerized us. She wished she could place Simon’s hand on her belly to let him feel the baby, and realized she wanted to feel Simon’s hand rest against her belly. She blushed.

Simon took her hand.

“Meterling, will you marry me?”

He said it quietly, not knowing her response. He had thought about it for weeks, even from the moment he first sat in the living room. He chased guilt and desire away, but companionship remained constant. They had been able to lift the burden of grief together, bit by bit, and with it, guilt for being alive when Archer was not. Meterling pressed his hand.

“I am pregnant.”

“I know.”

“And you would get both of us.”

“I know that, too.”

“I get moody.”

“I will hold you.”

“Tightly?”

“As tightly as you need.”

“Of course, I will marry you. I never thought otherwise.”