“No. My family isn’t from here. I was a lorry driver till I had an accident. I used to drive all over Kerala. In that time I heard of a few other families like ours. All Christians. Surely there are others.”
She mulls over Cherian’s extraordinary admission all day. Cherian is wrong: they are related. The community of Saint Thomas Christians is now quite large, but they share the same ancestors in the original families that Doubting Thomas converted to Christianity. An image of a bicycle wheel comes to her mind. If she were to place each family with the Condition along a single spoke of the wheel, then Cherian’s family is on one spoke and the Parambil clan on another. The other afflicted families Cherian mentioned have their own spokes. Tracing the spokes back to the center will bring them to the ancestor with the altered gene with whom it all began. She’s excited. Her task is to find many more spokes, more families with the Condition. There’s one man she knows who can help.
Broker Aniyan’s thick gray hair is parted in the center and swept back on his temples; his intelligent eyes miss nothing as he cycles up to the house. He dismounts elegantly, swinging one leg forward and over the bar, the only option when wearing a mundu. In a place where mustaches are the rule, his clean-shaven face makes him look younger than his seventy years.
“Molay, I remember as if it were yesterday, I proposed an alliance for Elsie of Thetanatt with Philipose of Parambil.”
“I thought they met on a train!”
He smiles indulgently. “Aah, train meeting-greeting may be there, loving-longing may be there, but without a broker how can families be introduced, or dowry discussed, or horoscopes matched?”
Anna Chedethi has prepared tea and jackfruit halwa, Big Ammachi’s specialty.
“What if the horoscopes don’t match but the couple are adamant?” Mariamma asks.
Aniyan squeezes his eyes shut and opens them, a gesture that to outsiders might look like someone wincing with pain but in Kerala means something specific. “It’s not a problem. We adjust! That’s all. Most impediments are minor impediments, and minor impediments are no impediment. You see, parents often have faulty memories of the exact time of birth,” he says, with the patience of a priest who must regularly recite the articles of faith. He samples the halwa and approves. “Ladies, before we begin today, may I share with you three lessons I’ve learned in doing this for decades?”
Before Mariamma can interject, Anna Chedethi says, “Yes! Do tell us!”
“First lesson—and don’t take this wrong, molay—but your generation often tries to drive the bullock cart backward. In fact, the greater the education, the more someone will make this mistake,” he says, eyeing her meaningfully. “The first priority is to find the right person, is it not? You must look at this proposal, then that proposal, then make a table of pluses and minuses, correct?”
They nod. He sips his tea, smiles. “Wrong! That’s not the first priority.” He settles back, waiting. Mariamma asks, otherwise they’ll be here all day.
“First priority is: Set the date! Simple. You know why?”
They don’t.
“Because you set a date and you’re committed! Tell me, molay, if you decide to open a practice, will you first wait to see a patient walk by and then rent the building and put up a sign? Of course not! You commit! You rent an office, sign the lease for a certain date. You get furniture, is it not? Aah, aah. My dear God, if you only knew how much time I wasted with this doctorate fellow from Berkeley in United States of California. He comes on two weeks leave. I introduce mother and him to eight first-class, Yay-One suitable girls . . . and he goes back undecided! Why? No date! So, the first lesson is to commit to a date.”
“What’s the second?”
“Aah, aah, second lesson I already mentioned first.” He grins naughtily. “Maybe you weren’t paying attention earlier. I said, most impediments are . . . ?”
“Minor impediments,” the two women say in unison.
“Aah. And minor impediments are . . . ?”
“Not impediments!” Mariamma feels she’s back in primary school.
“Exactly. Adjustment is there.” He looks pleased.
Anna Chedethi can’t help herself. “Is there a third?”
“Certainly! There are ten. But these three I share because it makes my work easier. The rest will die with me. My son sees no future in this business because of the newspaper matrimonial advertisements. God help people who try that.”
Anna Chedethi clears her throat.
“Aah, yes. Third rule is this. Looks change, but character doesn’t. So, focus on character, not looks. And to know a girl’s character you look to the girl’s . . . ?”
“Mother?” they both say.
“Aah, correct.” He nods, pleased with his pupils. “And for a boy’s character you look to the boy’s . . . ?”
“Father!” they say, confidently.
“Wrong!” he says, pleased to have lured them into his trap. He lights a cigarette, then returns the spent match to the match box. Mariamma wonders why smokers all do this. Is it a parallel addiction that goes with nicotine? Or is this fastidiousness meant to compensate for using the world as an ashtray? She can suddenly taste the cigarette she took off Lenin in the lodge. “Wrong, my dear ladies. For the boy’s character, again you must look to the mother! After all, the only thing each of us can be sure of is who our mother is. Is it not?”
Anna Chedethi takes a second to digest this and bursts out laughing. Mariamma sees that Anna Chedethi is getting much too excited. She hasn’t told her why she invited Broker Aniyan.
“Achayan, are you related to our family?” Mariamma says.
“Certainly! On the Parambil side, I am your great-grandfather’s second cousin’s granddaughter’s husband’s brother.” He looks to the ceiling. “On the Thetanatt side—”
“Wait,” Mariamma says. “ ‘Great-grandfather’s second cousin’s granddaughter’s’ . . . That’s so distant . . . In that case you can claim you’re related to every family you call on.”
“No! If you can’t trace the relationship, you can’t claim anything!” he says with some indignation. “I can. Therefore, I’m related.”
“Achine,” she says, using the respectful term for “elder.” “I promise, when I’m ready to marry, I’ll come to you. No newspaper matrimonial. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I didn’t ask you here to help me get married. I need your help with a serious medical condition, one that took my father’s life. And the lives of others in our family—well, you know better than anyone. I don’t know your name for it, but Big Ammachi called it the Condition.”
She sits next to him and spreads out an expanded and updated copy of the genealogy, this one in Malayalam. “I copied this from the original, which our family kept for generations.”
Aniyan’s clever eyes dart around the sheet, a nicotine-stained fingernail traces the generations. “That’s an outright lie here—he never married,” he mutters. “Hmm, not three but four sisters here—twins—but one died as an infant, the other was Ponnamma . . .” In minutes with his pen, he has fleshed out three previous generations, working back from her grandfather. It’s more than she’s accomplished in weeks. He pointedly does not address the generations presently alive.
“Achayan, I’m trying to complete this chart.” She tells him about Cherian. Aniyan understands her “spokes of the wheel” analogy at once. “If I can complete all the spokes in the wheel, we’ll understand how the disease is inherited.”