1951, Parambil
Elsie is conscious but confused, and so very weak from blood loss. It is three days before she can sit up without feeling dizzy. Her recovery is painfully slow. She’s in no condition to breastfeed. The smiling, gap-toothed Anna Chedethi nurses the baby, which to Big Ammachi is proof that Hannah is still suckling at night for comfort. If Big Ammachi had known, she’d have scolded them both. Now she says a prayer of thanks.
Only on the fifth day does Big Ammachi bring Mariamma to her mother. She’s startled to see the same haunted, wretched expression on Elsie’s face that she’d puzzled over before labor. Elsie looks at her daughter with great tenderness, but that sentiment is overshadowed, drowned out by inexplicable sorrow. Her hands are like floppy leaves, and she makes no attempt to reach for the child. After an eternity, Elsie closes her eyes, as though she can no longer bear to look, while tears stream out from under her lids. She turns away, her shoulders shaking, sobbing inconsolably.
The child’s father sequesters himself in his room, marooned in his own home, unable to do more than observe through his window the comings and goings from the old bedroom. He doesn’t come out, or if he does it is when the household is fast asleep.
Parambil is transformed once more by a newborn and the industry around it. Diaper cloths flutter on the line and Baby Mol patrols outside, shushing everyone who comes by. Big Ammachi delights in her granddaughter, her namesake. But a new baby should bring joy to its parents. This one has done just the opposite.
Big Ammachi focuses her energy on Elsie, feeding her broth, then fish and meat, to restore her blood, along with the vaidyan’s restorative tonics. After a week, Elsie can walk. Big Ammachi supports her as they pace the room in tandem. By the third week Elsie shows color in her cheeks, taking longer and longer walks on her own, even bathing in the stream. Though she looks in on the baby, she doesn’t try to hold it, just gazes at it in Anna Chedethi’s arms. Big Ammachi cannot understand this, cannot shake her sense of foreboding, the sense that after all they’ve come through, there’s one more thing waiting to happen.
Three weeks after the birth, Elsie steps outside in the early evening, in the gloaming, to bathe in the stream. Before she leaves, she asks Big Ammachi if she could please make her the sardines steamed in banana leaf again, just as she did the previous day, with no spices save for a bit of salt.
It’s almost two hours before anyone realizes that she hasn’t returned.
CHAPTER 56
Missing
1951, Parambil
They search the house and its surroundings. Shamuel walks along the stream and the canal; he hails the families of the blacksmith, goldsmith, and potter to ask if they’ve seen Elsie. Joppan cycles up and down the dark roads and to all the neighboring houses to inquire. Others walk the riverbank. By midnight, members of the extended family pack the verandah, the women’s high-pitched voices a contrast to those of the men, who murmur in low registers. Caesar races around, barking. Joppan discreetly inspects every well, holding a burning palm frond torch over the mouth and peering in.
The next day, at first light, Georgie heads by bus to the Thetanatt house in the plains. If neither Elsie nor her brother is there, he’ll hire a car and go up to the estate. Uplift Master assigns sectors so they can systematically scour the Parambil property in a one-mile radius of the house. Shamuel canvases all the boatmen and is assured that no one ferried Elsie the previous evening. Joppan, bravely pushing a long stick before him, wades into the tall grass of the sarpa kavu at the edge of the property, a spot where large rocks arranged by humans indicate an ancient temple devoted to the serpent God and where no one trespasses. Joppan establishes that there are wriggling forms aplenty, but no Elsie.
Only Baby Mol is unperturbed by Elsie’s absence. When Big Ammachi asks her if she knows where Elsie is, Baby Mol says, “My dolls are hungry.” Big Ammachi feels her throat tighten.
By early afternoon, Georgie returns: Elsie isn’t at the family home, and her brother had just come down from the mountains an hour prior. He was certain that Elsie wasn’t in the estate bungalow. Georgie said Elsie’s brother had been less than gracious to him, treating him like a servant and not an elder from Parambil. Furthermore, the brother appeared drunk and had choice things to say about Philipose.
The efforts to find Elsie halt. Only Shamuel persists, going back over ground that’s already been searched. Twenty-four hours after Elsie disappears, Big Ammachi, Philipose, and Uplift Master are on the verandah when Shamuel comes walking up the driveway. His somber, almost ceremonial pace gets their attention, as does what he holds in his hands like an offering. “From the boat jetty I walked along the edge of the river. I came to that place where the screw pine is so thick. I noticed one spot where it was bent back, flattened. I pushed through and came to a small clearing. Enough for one person to stand.” His voice catches. “There only I found these.” He extends his arms. A bar of soap sits atop a neatly folded thorthu, blouse, and mundu, and beneath those, Elsie’s slippers.
Uplift Master informs the police at the substation. The best they can hope for now is word of a body being discovered downstream.
With Anna Chedethi nursing the baby, a sleepless Big Ammachi makes her way alone to the spot where Shamuel found Elsie’s clothes. She stands there, feeling the soil between her toes as Elsie must have. She stares at the rippling brown surface of the river, whose every mood she knows, from a lifetime of giving herself to its embrace. The tethered canoes ride higher on the jetty, a sign of rain in the mountains, but a bobbing tree limb moves by leisurely. She shudders to imagine Elsie in her weakened state, disrobing here and stepping in. What got into the girl? Did she crave communion with water, a longing to be cleansed, and renewed? Elsie is a strong swimmer but that was before she nearly bled to death. The river is merciless to those who underestimate it, and it is never the same river twice. Standing here Big Ammachi feels such oppression in her chest. After a long, long time she tears herself away, but not before she kneels to kiss the soil where Elsie last stood.
Her feet carry her to Elsie’s nest. She feels she is approaching a shrine, a sanctuary closed off from the world. The moss on the outside is thick, and the found objects woven into the wall appear to have been imprisoned there for decades.