From the first moment, Anna is like four extra pairs of hands. Big Ammachi wonders how she managed before Anna Chedethi. That suffix gives Anna the stature of a relative, not a hired servant. Hannah trails Big Ammachi just the way JoJo once did. Lord, I came here as a child myself, missing my mother and without a father. Now I’m mother to so many. Hannah looks three but holds up five fingers when asked her age. It isn’t long before Hannah’s cheeks rise like leavened bread. Big Ammachi helps Hannah to read, using the Bible as her text. The little girl sits absorbed with the Bible long after her lesson is over.
Big Ammachi and Anna Chedethi ready the bedroom in the old section of the house for Elsie’s delivery. It sits beside the ara, and above the cellar, so one could keep a close eye on the treasures of the house. The raised platform bed with corner posts that rise like church spires is cluttered with bolts of cloth. Big Ammachi delivered her children in this bed. Her mother used this bedroom in the last months of her life when she found it difficult to rise from the mat on the floor. The room has brass-studded, dark, teak-paneled walls and a decorative false ceiling. It is a museum of old Parambil artifacts, each with its own history, and she cannot bring herself to give any of it away. There’s a family of long-spouted brass kindis, and ornate oil and kerosene lamps that sit tarnishing since electricity arrived. In one corner of the room is a ceremonial seven-tiered oil lamp as tall as Big Ammachi. They clear almost everything but the bed. Anna Chedethi wipes down the walls and ceiling and polishes the red oxide floor until she can see her reflection. Elsie will deliver here in this room of memory, ceremony, and transition.
Big Ammachi, in the kitchen, hears a crash and runs back to the old bedroom; she finds Philipose up a ladder, pulling down objects from the crawl space above the ara, which is accessed from the old bedroom.
“I’m looking for Ninan’s wooden cycle,” he says. “The one without pedals. Isn’t it up here?”
“Are you mad? Get out!”
Later she hears him instructing Shamuel. “Elsie will deliver on the sixth. I want Sultan Pattar to make biryani—”
Big Ammachi pounces, furious. “What nonsense! You think this is a wedding? The moon keeps to that kind of schedule, not babies. Shamuel, you can go. No Sultan Pattar, nothing.” Shamuel retreats slowly, so that he might hear the rest. “What’s wrong with you, Philipose? Such inauspicious behavior! No celebration till we have a healthy baby.”
His eyes are those of a man who has lost all reason. She might have shared with him her anxiety about Elsie’s pregnancy, but this specter would not understand. What madness possessed him to drag Elsie’s stone away? Big Ammachi had commiserated with her daughter-in-law, but Elsie said, “It’s all right. The ideas in my head are inexhaustible. No one can move those.”
Big Ammachi knows something Philipose does not: Elsie is building another sculpture out by her old bathing spot, a place her husband never visits. It began as a bundle of twigs, then grew into a curved wall, and slowly it became a giant bird’s nest. Elsie roams the property relentlessly, breaking off green, malleable boughs, and dry twigs, weaving them into the nest along with found objects including rag cloth, strands of cane from the seat of an old chair, ribbons, a rusted pulley, coir rope, a doorknob. After a churchman pays a visit, Big Ammachi finds his prayer beads plaited into the nest. Elsie is like a tailorbird, swiveling her head this way and that, scanning the ground as she walks barefoot through brush and undergrowth. Her hands are blistered from the work. Big Ammachi wonders: Is a nest really art? Has this pregnancy affected her judgment?
One morning she notices Elsie walking stiffly, as though on stilts. She forces her to lie down. “Look at your feet! They’ll be like Damodaran’s soon! No more walking.” Elsie’s ankles have disappeared. Her toenails are dull, and her heel fissured like a dry riverbed. Yellow calluses crowd the ball of her foot. “Why aren’t you wearing your slippers? I should have paid attention.” But Big Ammachi has been focused on the shape of Elsie’s belly, looking for the loss of height that tells her the baby’s head has entered the pelvis—she has just seen that change. She hopes she’s wrong because it’s early. “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she says sternly. “Sit with me. Draw or paint instead of collecting kara-bura,” she says, inventing a word on the spot.
She and Elsie move to the old bedroom, Elsie on the bed, while Big Ammachi sleeps on a mat on the floor. The first night she hears Elsie tossing and turning, her restlessness a sign of imminent labor. The waiting is over, even if it’s earlier than she expected. Near dawn, when Big Ammachi opens her eyes, she finds Elsie staring at her. For an eerie moment she feels some other person occupies Elsie’s body and wants to tell Big Ammachi something that she wouldn’t want to hear.
“Molay, what is it?”
Elsie shakes her head. She admits to having intermittent warning cramps. When the sun is up, Elsie says, “Ammachi, please walk with me to my nest.” They head out, Elsie’s arm around the shorter woman’s shoulders. They slip in through the nest’s overlapping entrance that at first glance is invisible. The top of the nest reaches to Big Ammachi’s chest. “I hope I can do more big pieces like this. Outdoors. That is, if I survive this labor.”
“What nonsense is that? ‘If I survive’?” Big Ammachi says, pretending to be annoyed.
Elsie stares at the older woman and seems about to unburden herself. Then she turns away. She sighs.
“What is it, molay?”
“Nothing. Ammachi, if something happens to me, please care for this baby. Promise me?”
“Chaa! Don’t talk like that. Nothing will happen. But why even ask? Of course I will.”
“If it’s a daughter I want her to have your name.”
By way of answer, she hugs Elsie, who clings to her. When they separate, Big Ammachi is taken aback by Elsie’s grief-stricken expression. She soothes her with words, with touch. She remembers the intensity of her own emotions, her fears as labor drew near, and for Elsie it is imminent. This fragility is a sign.
Big Ammachi goes to Philipose. “Now, listen to me. Elsie has been adamant that she delivers in the house. But I don’t like what I’m seeing. I can’t explain. She will deliver any moment. Arrange a car for us—”
He leaps up from the bed, alarmed. “Now? But my calendar—”
“What did I say about your calendar? We can go to the mission hospital in Chalakad. I really thought we had more time. Dear God, if only a hospital were closer.”
But just then, Anna Chedethi calls out for her in a tone that cannot conceal her anxiety.
“Never mind,” Big Ammachi says. Elsie’s water must have broken.
Anna Chedethi has strung white bedsheets over the lower half of the windows of the old bedroom. Philipose standing outside looks uncomprehendingly at this sight. He corrals Shamuel as he walks by and says, “Looks like our Ninan is in a hurry to land, just like last time. We must slaughter a goat. And arrange for toddy—” His mother, inside the room with Elsie, overhears him and is about to go out and scold him when she hears Shamuel’s voice, but not sounding like Shamuel at all.
“Chaa! Stop! Just keep quiet. Don’t talk to me. If you want to help, go to church and pray. Take a vow not to visit Krishnankutty’s shop. That’s what you can do.”
Silence follows.
Elsie’s moans are rhythmic. Big Ammachi prepares herself, gathering her hair into a tight bun, glancing at the mirror. Her locks are thinner, and more gray than black. Just yesterday, she was the young bride writhing in pain in this very room with her first child. But it wasn’t yesterday. It was the year of our Lord 1906. It feels as though she’s just glanced away from this same mirror . . . and it’s 1951 and she’s in her seventh decade! Her earlobes are so stretched now. But the look she yearned for as a young woman means nothing to her now. She straightens her back; if she’s not careful, soon her shoulders will float up to meet her ears. Already, she’s tilted like a crooked palm from all the years of carrying JoJo, then Baby Mol, then Philipose, then Ninan, always on her left side so that her right hand was free to stir the pot or twitch the kindling. She sighs and crosses herself. “Lord, my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer . . . be with us now.”
Elsie cries out, “Ammay—?” A contraction must be coming on.