Follow the straight path. There’ve been times when Lenin hated his father, wished terrible things on him. But he doesn’t now. The lingering feel of his father’s hand on his shoulder makes him sad. He’s very scared now. He’d suffer school without a complaint if it would make everyone well.
The next morning, before he opens his eyes, he thinks, Let this be a bad dream. Let me see my mother moving about, and my father holding the baby. But his father’s skin is as cold as stone. He has forgotten to breathe. His features are distorted from the blisters, and a puzzled expression is frozen on his face. His sister’s mouth moves like a fish out of water, her chest heaving sporadically, and as he watches, it comes to a stop. Lenin has never seen a dead body, but he knows he’s looking at two. His mother still breathes. Something breaks inside him. He flings the empty water vessel against the wall. He shakes his mother violently. “How can I manage if there’s no one to care for me?” He falls on her, weeping. “I’m your baby. Please, Amma, don’t leave me.” Her eyes are rolled back, unseeing. She’s beyond hearing.
It is hot outside, but he shivers with hunger and fear. Follow the straight path—that was the last thing his father said. He will do that. He will walk in a straight line till he gets food or drops dead. Nothing will stop him. If he comes to water . . . well then, he’ll drown.
The straight line brings him over a fence, past a menacing bull, through a field, and soon a large whitewashed house comes into view. The Christian family living there owns much of this area. They have wanted nothing to do with Kora and Lizzi. Their house looks different to Lenin. It’s because every door and window is bolted. A man’s voice yells from inside: “DON’T YOU DARE COME CLOSER! GO AWAY BEFORE I UNCHAIN THE DOG!”
Lenin pauses, shocked. This family has coconut trees, kappa, chicken, and many cows. Can they not share? Do they not have pity? Tears stream down his face. He is committed. Follow the straight line. He stumbles forward. Send the dog. If it doesn’t eat me, maybe I can eat it. Either kill me or give me food.
A face thrusts itself from the rushes on his right side, startling him. It’s a thin pulayi woman, his mother’s age, a thorthu covering her breasts. Does she mean him harm?
“Monay, move over here where they don’t see you,” she says. The rushes conceal her from the big house. He does what she said. “I’m Acca, from over there,” she says, pointing to a tiny hut he now sees. “You’re Lenin, aren’t you?” She diagnoses his condition in one glance. “Wait there. I’ll bring you some food.”
He trembles with anticipation. She returns with a banana leaf packet and two bananas, setting them down short of him and retreating to squat twenty feet from him. Fried fish! Rice! He gobbles it down, then finishes the bananas.
“Monay,” she says, “you don’t have any sores?” Hearing her say “monay” brings tears to his eyes. He wants to run into her arms. He raises his arms to show he’s unaffected. “And the others?” she asks.
He brushes at his wet cheeks. “Appa and the baby are dead. Amma can’t see or hear me.”
He hears her sharp, sucking intake of breath. “Your mother . . . you can live many lifetimes and not meet one as decent as Lizzi Chedethi. A heart like gold. And beautiful too.” She dabs her eyes with her cloth. “Monay,” she says, “this is smallpox. It’s bad. That’s why they say, ‘Don’t count your children till the smallpox has come and gone.’ My husband and I had it. We can’t get it again. Many have died around here.”
“I wish I had it,” Lenin says. “Then when my mother goes, I can go with her.” His tears fall into the dirt.
She sniffles. “No. Don’t say that. God spared you for a reason.” She stands. “I’ll send word to get you help.”
“Acca! Wait.” She turns. For a pulayi to give him fish and rice when they live on kanji and pickle is generous beyond belief. “Acca, you saved me. I promise you, if I live, I’ll find a way to give back to you what you gave me many times over. Those people in the house wanted to set the dog on me. Are they not Christians?”
Her laughter has an unpleasant edge to it. “Christians, is it? Aah. My grandfather became a Christian, so we are too. My grandfather thought surely now his landowner will invite him inside the house to eat with him! No one told him that the pulayar Jesus died on a different cross. It was the short, dark cross behind the kitchen!” She laughs again.
He doesn’t know what to say. “I think you are a saint.”
“Listen, if it makes you feel better, they only sent me to market to get fish and mutton two days ago. When I returned, they were scared for me to come near. What if I carried smallpox? Or what if it was on the food? They told me to keep it. So we cooked and had a feast! You’re lucky there was any left.” Her expression is serious. “No, I’m no saint, monay.” She rises. “And I was teasing. It’s the same cross. Same Jesus. It’s just that people don’t treat each other the same. You’re praying, I hope? I’ll send word for help.”
As he walks home, he realizes that all this time he hasn’t once prayed. It never occurred to him! Would it have made a difference?
The rancid smell reaches him even before he opens the door. His mother breathes noisily. His father’s face is sunken, and almost unrecognizable. His sister is stiff, like a wooden doll.
He drags his mother to the door, toward the fresh air, by pulling on her mat. He lies next to her. Her breath is unpleasant. The mother he knows is gone, but he wants to be close to what’s left of her. One last time, Amma, hold me. He drapes her arm over him. It exposes her belly, and he sees the scar where his father, crazed on asthma cigarettes, stabbed her, and where Lenin’s hand pushed out. Doctor Digby put it back and christened him Lenin Evermore.
Lying there next to his mother, he tries to pray. Acca’s face comes to him. It soothes him. Perhaps that was his Mary. A pulayi Mary. “God, please send another angel to save Amma. If you don’t, then when you take my Amma take me too.”
In the morning, the angel comes wearing a white cassock with a belt around the waist, and the black cap of a priest. His sandaled feet are white to the ankles with dust. He’s rail thin, with piercing, kind eyes and a flowing gray beard. The angel looks about the shack, troubled. The smell is something one can reach out and touch. When he looks down at Lenin’s mother, from the expression on his face, Lenin knows she is dead. When he fell asleep her body was warm. She’s so cold now.
“Lenin Evermore? Isn’t that your name?” The angel holds out his arms.
CHAPTER 58
Light the Lamp
1959, Parambil
Big Ammachi sits in the glow of the oil lamp on the verandah in front of the ara as she feeds her eight-year-old granddaughter.
The lamp casts their shadows on the teak wall behind them, two ovals, one larger than the other. The pebbles in the muttam glitter after the evening shower, and here and there a stone seems to move. Grandmother and granddaughter hear Philipose call out, “Time for prayers!”
“Chaa! Your father!” Big Ammachi says. “I used to have to remind him about prayers.”
“My father says frogs come from pebbles.” Mariamma is perched on the edge of her chair, her legs swinging, as another pebble jumps, defying gravity.
“Aah. That means his head is still full of pebbles. I thought I shook most of them out.” The little girl’s laugh displays gap teeth, and Big Ammachi slides a rice ball into her mouth. “Maybe he got that from those English books he reads only to you,” she says, pretending to be jealous. Philipose even speaks to Mariamma in English, leaving the Malayalam to everyone else. “Is he reading you the one about the big white fish?”
Mariamma shakes her head, turning somber. “No. Another. This boy Oliver has no mother, no father. He’s always starving. The other children are mean and make him go ask for food. The man got angry and sold Oliver to another man who makes funerals.”