1903, Parambil
In the three years since her arrival, she’s transformed the covered breezeway outside the kitchen into her personal space; she has a rope cot here where she and JoJo nap after lunch and where she teaches the five-year-old his letters. It allows her to keep an eye on the pots on the hearth and the paddy drying on mats in the muttam. While JoJo sleeps she sits on the cot, rereading the only printed material in the house: an old issue of the Manorama. She can’t bring herself to throw the paper away. If she does, there’ll be nothing, no words on which her eyes might rest. She’s tired of chastising herself for not bringing a Bible with her to Parambil; instead, she directs her annoyance to JoJo’s mother. It’s unthinkable for a Christian household not to have the Holy Book.
JoJo stirs just as she sees Shamuel returning from the market with the shopping, a sack balanced on his head. He squats before her and empties the sack before folding it away.
Shamuel mops his face with his thorthu, his eyes falling on the newspaper. “What does it say?” he asks, pointing with his chin as he smooths out his thorthu and drapes it over his shoulder.
“Do you think something new crawled in there since the last time I read it to you, Shamuel?”
“Aah, aah,” he says. His graying brows frame eyes that like a child’s cannot conceal his disappointment.
The next week when Shamuel returns from the provision store and empties his sack, he says in his usual manner, “Matches. Two is coconut oil. Three is bitter gourd. Garlic, four. Malayala Manorama—” setting the paper down as though it’s another vegetable. He can barely conceal his delight when she clutches the paper to herself, elated. “Weekly it will come,” he says, proud to have pleased her. She knows that only her husband could have arranged this.
Later that morning, she spots her husband not far from the house, but ten feet off the ground, seated in the fork of a plavu, or jackfruit tree, his back against the trunk and his legs extended along the branch, a toothpick at the corner of his mouth. She’s tempted to wave the newspaper to convey to him how grateful she is. She still marvels at his choosing these lofty perches instead of putting his legs up on the long arms of his charu kasera; his particular chair is striking in size because it is made to his proportions, yet it sits unoccupied on the verandah. She observes him up there; his face in profile is handsome, she thinks. A pulayan below him and out of her sight says something that makes her husband remove the toothpick and grin, showing strong, even teeth. You should smile more often, she thinks. He yawns and stretches, adjusting his position, and her stomach turns cold. A fall from even this modest height would be devastating. Whenever she spots him so high up a distant tree that he’s no more than an eccentric bump marring a smooth trunk she cannot bear to look. Shamuel says that it’s from that vantage point that he reads the land, plans the direction of irrigation ditches or new paddy fields.
In the evenings after she serves dinner and while her husband eats, she reads the Manorama to him. He never picks it up himself. The newspaper brightens her days, but it does nothing for a profound loneliness that she’s ashamed to acknowledge. Thankamma, who had promised to return, writes that her husband has taken ill and is bedridden, so she has put off her visit indefinitely. As for her mother, three monsoons have come and gone and they have yet to see each other! Her mother tells her not to visit. Even if she wanted to, a young woman doesn’t make such a journey alone. JoJo, who clings to her like a bracelet, won’t go near the boat jetty, let alone climb into a boat. She suspects her husband is the same way.
When her formal evening prayers are done, she converses with the Lord. “I’m so happy about the newspaper. My husband clearly cares about my needs. Should I mention the other matter? I don’t mean to complain, but if this is a Christian house, why don’t we go to church? I know you’ve heard this before. If my mother could only come here, I wouldn’t bother you. I could talk it over with her.”
Perhaps in answer to her incessant prayers, at last a letter comes from her mother after long months of silence. Shamuel calls at the church on his way to the mill and this time he comes back excitedly holding the letter with both hands because he knows how precious it is; his excitement is nearly a match for hers.
My darling daughter, my treasure, how it warmed my heart to see your letter. You won’t know how many times I kissed it. Your cousin Biji is getting married. I go to the church every day. I visit your father’s grave and I pray for you. My most precious memories are with him, and then with you. What I am saying is please treasure each day you are in your marriage. To be a wife, to care for a husband, to have children, is there anything more valuable? Keep me in your prayers.
She revisits the letter many times in the ensuing days, kissing it each time like a sacred object. No matter how many times she reads it, it does nothing to diminish her worry. She resists the reality of life: a married woman gives up her childhood home forever, and a widow’s fate is to remain in the home she married into.
The calendar on the wall—a pullout from the newspaper—looks like a mathematical table and astronomy chart. It shows lunar phases, the times each day that are inauspicious for setting out on a journey. Now it tells her this is the start of Lent, the fifty-day fast leading up to Good Friday. She will give up meat, fish, and milk, but on the first day she doesn’t eat even a morsel.
When her husband sits down to dinner that evening she puts the freshly cut banana leaf and the jeera water on the table. He smooths out the leaf. She frames the words she’s rehearsed. Just as she opens her mouth to speak, he flattens the spine of the banana leaf with his fist—Crack! Crack!—startling her. He splashes jeera water on the green mirrored surface, brushing the excess off in the direction of the muttam. The moment is gone. She quietly serves the rice, the pickle, the yogurt . . . then she approaches with the meat, to see if he’ll wave it off on this first day of Lent. But no, he’s impatient for it. What made her think this year would be different from previous years?
In the days that follow, neither meat nor fish crosses her lips; she misses the companionship of a household that is fasting, but her loneliness only strengthens her determination.
“You should eat more,” Shamuel says, halfway through Lent. “You’re getting too thin.” It’s forward of Shamuel to speak this way. “The thamb’ran says so. He’s worried.” She feels like the people on a hunger strike pictured in the paper, camped outside the Secretariat: becoming more diminished in order to be seen.
“If the thamb’ran thinks so, he should tell me.”