Mariamma overhears her father say to Big Ammachi, “The school sent for me again. Another fight. Because Lenin wanted to start a Communist Party chapter. He’s ten! Ammachi, don’t argue. Boarding school is what he needs.” Mariamma should be pleased to hear this, but somehow, she isn’t.
She dreams that night of Shamuel. He says, “Obey your father! He knows you break his rules. You’re no different from Lenin and he might have to send you away.” She wakes up troubled. What did it mean? If only she still shared a bed with Hannah she would have an answer. For Hannah, every dream had a meaning, just as for Joseph in Genesis. But Hannah has gone to convent school on a scholarship. Anna Chedethi doesn’t know that Hannah wants to be a nun, which is why she loves fasting more than eating; Anna Chedethi would be shocked to learn that her daughter “mortifies” her flesh with a belt of knotted rope under her clothes. Hannah said that was what nuns did. Mariamma has no desire to be a nun.
Without Hannah, Mariamma must puzzle over her dream alone. Why was Shamuel in it? Everyone talks about Shamuel in the present tense. Can a person really be dead when he is talked about as though alive? She remembers the day Shamuel went missing. He’d gone to the provision store, and when he wasn’t back well after lunch, her father went out looking. He retraced Shamuel’s route. At the burden stone, he was relieved to see Shamuel, squatting down, leaning against one of the uprights while his sack rested on the horizontal slab. His chin was on his chest, as if he were sleeping. But he was cold to the touch. Shamuel’s heart had stopped.
It was the first death in Mariamma’s young life. She remembers her father leaving on his bicycle for Iqbal’s godown, and returning with Joppan sitting sidesaddle on the horizontal bar. She’d never seen tears on the faces of grown men until that day. They laid Shamuel’s body outside his hut in a coffin that rested on top of the old trestle that he loved. So many came to pay respects—it was as though a maharajah had died. Big Ammachi’s grief had scared Mariamma; her grandmother wept by the casket, touching the forehead of a man who she said had watched over her from the day she arrived in Parambil sixty years before. They buried Shamuel next to his wife in the cemetery of the CSI church. Much later, her father and Big Ammachi had a brass panel set into the horizontal slab of the burden stone. Mariamma has made rubbings of the big letters with charcoal and paper. In Malayalam it reads, “COME TO ME ALL YE THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.”
IN LOVING MEMORY OF SHAMUEL OF PARAMBIL
It’s nearly dawn and she is no closer to the dream’s meaning. She slips out of her room and ducks under her father’s window. He won’t hear her, but she can’t let him see her shadow. Once clear of the house she races to the stream and then on to the canal. She hears footsteps behind her: Podi. They share one mind: whenever Mariamma leaves her bed, somehow Podi knows. The rules say they’re not to swim without adults around. Rules are good for needlepoint and for nuns. She dives in, the water roaring around her ears. Moments later there’s an explosion beside her as Podi plunges in. Swimming in the canal is their biggest secret and her greatest pleasure, even though if they’re discovered the consequences are . . . well, she doesn’t like to think about consequences.
Mariamma must get ready for school, but Podi lingers because Joppan is away. When her father is gone, Podi skips school and does as she pleases. If Joppan finds out, and he usually does, he thrashes her. Mariamma has heard him yell at Podi: “I was chased away when I wanted to study! Now they welcome you, and you’re too lazy to go?” Joppan fascinates Mariamma. She only knows this one canal, while he knows every canal. Some people, no matter what they do, just seem larger, more significant, more confident than others. Joppan is like that. Lenin too. She’s envious.
When she sees her father at breakfast, it hits her: the dream. Shamuel was telling her that her father knows about the canal! Maybe he always has. Before she heads to school, she goes to his room, where he’s reconciling bills, muttering to himself. Seeing her, he pushes the ledger aside and looks up, smiling. She stands by his desk, straightens his pencils, ready to confess. She has a rule: she always tells the truth . . . when asked. She opens her mouth . . . but blurting out the truth when not asked is proving hard. She has to say something. She’s committed. “Appa, I dreamed of Shamuel,” she says at last.
“Yes?”
She nods. “Appa? Joppan is gone a lot.”
“And?”
“All right, I’ll see you later.” Not confessing is much easier than confessing.
Shamuel? Joppan? Philipose sits there bewildered, then he shakes his head and chuckles to himself. Joppan is gone a lot. Had Mariamma stayed for more than ten seconds, and if she had really wanted to know, he might have told her that there was a moment when he thought he’d convinced Joppan to be around all the time. It was soon after Shamuel’s funeral. His mother had summoned Joppan. He remembers that she sat, puffy-eyed, on her rope cot outside the kitchen while he and Joppan sat across from her on the low stools, like schoolboys. Big Ammachi said that whenever she paid Shamuel his wages, he’d take what he needed and ask her to save the rest for him in the strongbox in the ara. When the bank first opened, she put his savings into a joint account. “Now this is yours, Joppan,” she said, handing him the passbook. Shamuel’s house and plot were Joppan’s too, to go along with Joppan’s own plot. She also told Joppan she was writing over to him the long, narrow strip of land behind his plot that connected to the road. It was his to do with as he wished. She blessed Joppan, and through tears said that Shamuel was family, and Joppan, Ammini, and Podi were too.
After that, Philipose asked Joppan if he had a minute to visit with him. They sat in Elsie’s old studio. Joppan lit a beedi and studied the passbook. After a while Joppan grinned and said, “How many cows you think are in here?” Philipose was puzzled. “Whenever I named a sum to my father that was more than a few rupees, he’d say, ‘How many cows is that?’ He knew what one cow was worth—that was his currency.” Joppan’s smile faded. “My father could have shown me the passbook before. You’d think he’d have appreciated that I know numbers and can keep accounts. If he saw me reading, he’d frown. It scared him for me to have that knowledge. He was a good man. But he wanted me to be him. The next Shamuel pulayan of Parambil.”