The ghosts of her grandmother and Baby Mol hover close by, reminding her once more of her purpose, of why she left. Everything she is, and all that she aspires to, began in this house and its loving inhabitants. After coming home from Alwaye College for the funeral, she’d been back just once more, shortly before she started medical school. On those previous visits, the household still felt shattered from the deaths. But now she senses that her father and Anna Chedethi have learned to live with the loss; they’ve settled into a new routine. For Mariamma, this only makes the absence of those two beloved pillars of this house more glaring—like a tear in a fabric that no one else sees.
Anna Chedethi has made her favorite, meen vevichathu, the crimson liquid so thick a pencil would stay upright in it. “The fishmonger showed up yesterday. The old lady herself—not her daughter-in-law. The only thing in her basket was this avoli. She said, ‘Tell Mariamma I brought this fellow just for her. Tell her I’ve a terrible ache in my neck and down my arms. The vaidyan’s pills are useless. If I toss them in the river, it’d be better for me, but bad for the fish.’ ” Mariamma pictures the old woman, her forearms dry and cobblestoned as though engrafted by the fish scales that shower down from her head basket. Now the old woman’s gift sits in Big Ammachi’s clay pot, transformed into a red-coated fillet, its white flesh melting on her tongue, the curry staining crimson the rice, her fingers, and the porcelain plate.
Her father is anxious to share news that isn’t news to her. She feels it hover over the table, exaggerated by his efforts to pretend it isn’t there. He waits till she finishes.
“Molay, I’ve to tell you something that will upset you. God knows, it’s all we talk about.” Anna Chedethi, who was clearing the dishes, stops and sits down. “Lenin has disappeared,” he says. “Did you know?”
“I’ve been worried. He hasn’t written for a while.” Another half-truth.
“Well . . . believe it or not, he’s joined the Naxalites,” her father says.
The price of deceit is to feel like a cockroach. She listens as he recounts the newspaper stories of the raids, and of Arikkad’s death while trying to escape. “The Naxalite business seemed so far away to us till now,” he says. “Up in Malabar, or Bengal. Suddenly it’s here in our laps.”
Her father has always been a handsome man. But for the first time she notices the permanence of the dark pigmentation under his eyes, the worry lines on his forehead, the sag of his cheeks, and the shiny scalp peeking through his thinning hair. He’s fifty, she realizes. A half century of living. But even so, has time sped up at Parambil since she’s been gone?
When a daughter falls in love, a distancing from the father is perhaps inevitable; the first man who had her heart must now compete with another. But in Mariamma’s case, it’s her secrets that create the distance. Anna Chedethi looks at her anxiously, worried that this revelation might shatter her.
“It’s terrible,” Mariamma says, because she must say something. “If he joined the Naxalites, then he’s more stupid than I thought. If he wanted to help the poor, why not join the Party, run for office?” She had suggested just that to Lenin. “Why this? He’s an idiot. Just throwing away his life!” The vehemence of her words takes them aback. Has she overdone it?
“Well,” her father says after a while, “one thing I’ll say for Lenin, from the very first day he showed up here, he stated his intentions. He always felt deeply for the pulayar. The yoke on their necks weighed on his. We sit here and believe we are enlightened, fair. But the truth is we can be blind to injustice. He never was.”
If only Lenin could hear her father defending him.
When Anna Chedethi goes for her bath, Mariamma sits alone in the dark kitchen that is so redolent with scent and memory. She recalls Damodaran once applying his ancient eye to the window and Big Ammachi pretending to be annoyed, scolding him. The week her grandmother died, Damo disappeared into the jungle near the logging camp. This they only learned later from Unni, who had waited in his forest hut for weeks to no avail. Damo went to keep Big Ammachi company, no doubt. Unni was a broken man. Mariamma finds the matchbox and lights one of Big Ammachi’s palm-sized oil lamps, the kind that her grandmother favored, and would take with her when she went to bed. Mariamma weeps unabashedly, picturing that kindly face bathed by the lamp’s soft glow. But her grandmother is with her always; these tears are for the past, for innocent times when she sat here and was fed by that loving hand, was entertained with stories, and knew she was cherished.
She composes herself before joining her father in his study. How she’s missed the aroma of old newspapers and journals, and of homemade ink! And missed his familiar scent of sandalwood soap and neem toothpaste; missed this hallowed time at the end of each day when he read stories to her. Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it? But tonight, she’s the storyteller, because he’s hungry to hear every detail of her medical world, bringing his curiosity like a moth to anything that shines of new knowledge. He craves every detail. She obliges, describes it all for him . . . all but Brijee.
When they turn in, he says, “It must be so hard to see such suffering every day.” He shudders. “I couldn’t do it. Only luck and the grace of God keeps us free of such afflictions. We’re so blessed, aren’t we?”
She marvels that a man who has suffered so much can feel this way. “Appa, I’m ashamed to say I often take it for granted. I used to be frightened of the sick. Now, we’re all so focused on disease that sometimes the person suffering barely registers. When I come home from L&D, or the surgical wards, I’m only thinking about dinner, or wondering if there’s a letter waiting. I think all doctors have the illusion that we have some sort of bargain with God. We care for the sick and are spared in return.”
“That reminds me,” her father says, handing her a paper. “I came across this in my reading, the oath of Paracelsus. I said, ‘I must copy this for Mariamma.’ ” Her father’s writing is normally illegible, but this he’s painstakingly printed out. “I thought, ‘I want my Mariamma to be this kind of doctor.’ ” She reads, “Love the sick, each and every one, as if they were your own.”