Entering she spots a white, rectangular paper on the ground, held down by a polished oval stone, a river rock of the kind that Elsie used as weights on her worktable. Her heart races. Whoever had searched here had been looking for a person, not a piece of paper, and they missed it. She bends down to pick it up. It is the thick, grainy kind Elsie used for drawing and painting. There was a time before Ninan’s death when such papers bred all over the house, spilling from Baby Mol’s bench to the kitchen. Since her return, Elsie’s strong hands had foregone charcoal and brush for the heft of the mallet and chisel before she turned to making the nest. Dew has curled the paper’s edges—it has been here overnight, but not longer, because it’s still pristine white. Her fingers tremble as she unfolds it. Big Ammachi sees a simple drawing, conveying with a minimum of lines on the page a familiar subject: mother and child. The faces and figures are not detailed, but with a curve here and a dash there they nevertheless allow her to see eyebrows, nose, lips . . .
“This is important, isn’t it, molay?” The paper shakes in her hands. She studies it. There’s the infant, of course. But the mother is far from young, judging by the slight stoop, by the forward thrust of the neck. “Molay, molay,” she exclaims, her heart contracting. “Ayo, molay, what were you trying to say? That’s me, isn’t it? If it were you, she’d be taller, younger, and the brow wouldn’t have that wrinkle. Are you telling me to care for your baby? You asked me that already. You know I will. But I’m sixty-three years old! Fathers might be dispensable, but a child needs its mother. Oh, Elsie, what have you done? Was this to say goodbye?” She’s overcome and must sit on the ground.
Her body tells her with certainty that Elsie will never return; that Elsie gave herself to the river deliberately. The thought of Elsie leaving this message here, moments before she went to the river and took her life, is wrenching. She clutches the paper to her bosom and gives in to her sorrow.
She hears the distant sound of Anna Chedethi calling out from the kitchen. “Big Ammachi-o?” From the rising, musical o at the end, she knows that whatever it is Anna wants, it isn’t urgent. But the melodic summons feels like a conclusion. It is a reminder that Parambil must go on. A householder, a mother, a grandmother has precious duties that don’t cease, that go on till her dying day.
She tells no one about her find. She guards it jealously; it’s a private message from her daughter to her. She stores the paper with the genealogy, in the same wardrobe where she keeps the snowy kavani bordered with real gold that she wears for weddings and funerals.
In the ensuing years, on Mariamma’s birthday, and on other occasions when Elsie enters her thoughts, she will pull out the drawing, but always at night in the soft light of her lamp. Every time she sees it, the economy of those lines startles her anew. It could be the Virgin Mary and child. It could be many things. But she knows it’s meant to be her, cradling her namesake. She never sees Elsie in it.
That rectangular sheet of paper holds the round world and its imagined corners, the remembrances of the disappeared and the dead, and the beating hearts of the faithful who pray each night that God’s will be done, not knowing what that will be.
Part Seven
CHAPTER 57
Invictus
1959, Manager’s Mansion in the village of M____
Lenin Evermore is a week short of his ninth birthday when the pestilence descends on the one-room shack that is their home. It comes with the suddenness of a lizard falling from the rafters. When his mother, Lizzi, said one morning that school was closed, he rejoiced, too pleased to ask why. The next morning, instead of waking to the sounds of his mother puttering in the kitchen, there is silence. His parents are still on their mats, his baby sister between them. Their faces glisten with sweat. He recalls they felt unwell the previous night.
His mother’s skin is hot. When Lenin touches his baby sister, Shyla, who is just five months old, she screams as if he’s pricked her with a needle. The crying rouses his father, who clutches his forehead, grimacing. Kora struggles to his feet, but sways. Lenin wonders if his father is hungover. But Kora had returned sober the previous night, unable to find food. They had filled their bellies with kanji water, only a trace of rice in it, and gone to bed.
“I must feed the cow,” Kora says, his voice wheezier than usual and hoarse like stone scraping on stone. But he cannot stand up. He shakes his wife’s shoulder but she only moans. Father and son stare at each other. Lizzi is the backbone of the family.
“Are you with fever too, monay?” Lenin shakes his head. “Then get water for us. And give hay and water for the cow. Please.” As an afterthought, Kora says, “Everything will be all right.” Then his father tries to flash his winning smile, the kind “Manager” Kora uses to persuade a headman that milk and honey will flow if villagers sign with him, and no, no, there’s no malaria up in that estate—who said?—just palatial quarters, and milk and honey—did I mention? But his smile cannot be sustained this morning. “I’ve seen this before,” his father says, rubbing the bumps on his skin. “If people know we have it then no one’s going to help us. They won’t come near.” He puts his hand on his wife’s cheek, also showing bumps. “Your blessed mother. What all I put her through.” Lenin is surprised; this admission is unlike him. Then his father says, “Everything will be all right.”
Lenin wasn’t really scared till his father uttered that reassurance for a second time. It meant things were not all right. That bad things were about to happen because of something his father had done. There was a time, before Lenin was born, when they had a house in Parambil, a place Lenin has never seen but from his mother’s stories he pictures as Eden, with loving family all around. From overhearing his parents, he knows that Kora’s troubles forced them to flee Parambil. After that, his mother took complete charge. She helped her husband find employment as an estate writer in Wayanad in Malabar. Lenin has faint memories of those times. But when he was four or five, his father had got into trouble. Lizzi sold her last pieces of jewelry to buy a shack on a tiny plot; it was to ensure she was never again homeless. She forbade Kora from borrowing or doing anything but working for a wage. The shack is where they had lived ever since, the place his father calls “Manager’s Mansion.”
Lenin feeds the cow and brings water back to the family. He tries to get his mother to drink, but she cannot. His mother lives by “Tell the truth and tell it early,” not “Everything will be all right.” Her husband cannot find work or hold down a job. It is Lizzi’s skill as a midwife that brings in coin, or meat and fish. She learned from a woman in the Wayanad estates. Two weeks ago, Kora came home late at night with the cow, saying he’d won it in a game of chance. Lenin had never seen his mother so angry. She insisted he take it back. His father looked frightened; he would be beaten up if he tried, he said. The cow isn’t allowed to leave the vicinity of their shack. And after all that, its udders are empty.
Lenin stays outside the house most of the day because it’s disturbing to look at the family. At dusk he searches the kitchen but finds nothing but spices; he chews on a clove. His hunger is an ache. He tries smoking a beedi nestled in his father’s box of asthma cigarettes. Before Lenin sleeps, he tries giving each of them water. He still cannot rouse his mother. Her beautiful face is marred by small swellings. Her curls are plastered down on her forehead. His father cannot raise his head; he takes one swallow, then grimaces in pain. His eyes lock urgently on Lenin’s, and he squeezes his son’s shoulder. The terror on his face is unlike anything Lenin has seen before. “Listen!” he whispers. “Don’t do what I did. Follow the straight path.” Those are his last sensible words.