Lord, I am ready.
He hovers over her, guides her to receive him. She bites her lips at the first sharp pain, muffling the cry that escapes. He pauses and retreats out of concern, but she pulls him down, hiding her face against the valley between his shoulder and chest so that he might not witness her shock, her disbelief at what is happening. Until that moment when he held her hand and led her to this room, they had never touched, not even by accident. Neither holding his hand nor lying in his arms prepared her for this. She feels stupid and ashamed for not knowing, for never imagining that what was supposed to “unfold in its own time,” as Thankamma once said, meant this breach of her body, meant taking him wholly into her insides. She feels betrayed by all the women who withheld this knowledge from her, who might have better prepared her. His extreme gentleness, his consideration for her is unnaturally paired with that first searing pain, then the dull discomfort it gives way to. His repetitive thrusts intensify, the pace quicker. How does this end? What must she do? Just when she fears he will break her, just when she wants to cry out for him to stop, his body stiffens, his back arches, and his expression becomes unrecognizable, pained—as though she inadvertently broke him. She is na?ve participant and horrified observer. He tries to stifle an agonal moan but fails . . . and comes to a shuddering stop. He lies on her, spent, a dead weight, his skin wet with perspiration.
Her thoughts are in turmoil, but she rejoices as it dawns on her that she has survived the ordeal. She has an urge to giggle at being pinned like this, by his sudden helplessness. She has not just endured, but it is her body, her contribution to what transpired that has left him robbed of all strength and rooted to her. Belatedly, as she slowly recovers her composure, she recognizes that she has blundered into full womanhood. The seconds tick by, and his weight crushes her so she can barely breathe, yet paradoxically she doesn’t want him to move, doesn’t want her feeling of power, of pride, and of ascendancy over him to end.
In later years, on the rare occasions when his appearance at her door, hand extended, is inconvenient, she never refuses, because in his tender embrace and the inelegant act of what follows, he expresses what he cannot say and what she needs to hear and what she begins to feel now for the first time lying under him: that she’s integral to his world, just as he is her world. She cannot imagine now that the pleasure she sees on his face will be something she too will experience from time to time, or that she’ll unobtrusively find ways to guide him in a manner that pleases her. For now, she’s so full with him she feels he has split her in two, and yet for the first time since her marriage, she is whole, complete.
Gradually, she feels a loosening, a slackening of his grip of her insides, and at last he rolls to one side, just his slab of a thigh over hers. His withdrawal leaves her insides smarting, leaves her exposed, and leaves a void between her legs in a place once sealed to the world. She’s no longer sure of this most intimate part of herself that feels forever altered. There’s wetness trickling down her thigh. She wishes to bathe, and yet, despite the raw, throbbing pain, she is reluctant to leave, relishing this sensation of her husband fast asleep, unconscious next to her, his head nestling against her, a hand draped over her chest, much in the manner of his son.
In the days that follow she feels free to say much more to him at dinner, not just the events of the household, but her thoughts, her feelings, and even her memories, without worrying about his response. Listening is talking for him; there’s an eloquence to this kind of attentiveness; it’s rare, and yet he’s generous with it. He alone amongst all the people she knows uses his two ears and one mouth in that exact proportion. She loves him in a way she didn’t know she could before. Love, she thinks, isn’t ownership, but a sense that where her body once ended, it begins anew in him, extending her reach, her confidence, and her strength. As with anything so rare and precious, it comes with a new anxiety: the fear of losing him, the fear of that heartbeat ceasing. That would mean the end of her.
Parambil settles into its rhythm: mouths to feed, mangoes to pickle, paddy to thresh, Easter, Onam, Christmas . . . a cycle she knows so well and by which she measures her days. To an observer, everything is the same. But after that night, all distance between husband and wife vanishes.
“Lord, thank you . . .” she says in her prayers. “I won’t mention specifics. After all, what don’t you know about my life on earth? But I have a question. When my husband fled the altar four years ago, I heard your voice say to me, ‘I am with you always.’ Did you speak to him too? Did you say, ‘Turn back’? Did you say, ‘She is the one I chose for you’?”
She waits. “Because I am, Lord. I am the one.”
CHAPTER 7
A Mother Knows
1908, Parambil
One morning, in her nineteenth year on earth, she wakes unrested, unable to rise, weighed down by a blanket of melancholy. JoJo tries to cheer her up, weaving her a ball from coconut fronds. “Over-under, over-under, then under-over, under-over, all right?” he says, forgetting who taught him. He is ten and already taller than his Ammachi, who will soon be twice his age, but whenever they are alone he reverts to acting much younger. An anxious JoJo helps her to the kitchen, but the simple act of blowing on the embers leaves her breathless.
After lunch she retreats to her bedroom and only wakes when her husband’s cool hand strokes her brow. She is shocked to see the sun is going down. She has done nothing for dinner; she bursts into tears. He sends JoJo away with a glance.
Why the tears? he asks with his eyebrows.
She shakes her head. He insists.
“You must forgive me. I don’t know what’s come over me.” His expression says he knows there’s more to it.
Ever since their marriage was consummated, she confides freely in her husband except when it comes to her mother. She’s ashamed for him to know just how impoverished her life had been before her marriage. When she was sixteen, she’d found the courage to beg Shamuel to accompany her on a trip to see her mother; she had Shamuel ask the thamb’ran’s permission. The thamb’ran agreed. She’d used Shamuel because she didn’t want to put her husband into a position of saying no to her. She wrote to her mother giving her the date of her visit. She had made up her mind that if she found her mother miserable, she would bring her back to Parambil. She could only hope her husband understood; a husband had no obligation to care for his mother-in-law. Two days before she was to leave, her mother’s letter came, emphatically forbidding her from visiting, saying it would only make matters worse. Her mother added that her brother-in-law promised that they would all visit Parambil very soon. Of course that never happened.
“I worry about my mother,” she says at last, weeping, relieved to finally confess what she has kept from him. “I know in my bones she is being mistreated, even starved. After my father died, my uncle wasn’t kind to us. My mother’s letters talk of everything but herself. I can feel her suffering.”
Her husband’s anvil-like hand remains on her brow but his face is very still.
The next day, he and Shamuel are gone before she wakes. There’s no sign of them all day and by nightfall they have not returned. She is beside herself with worry.