The following afternoon, a bullock cart jolts up the path from the boat jetty, brushing past the overgrown tapioca. Shamuel sits in front with the driver. A familiar figure peers over his shoulder.
She’d forgotten her mother’s tall forehead and her pinched nose, both of which are exaggerated because she’s so thin, her hair white, and her cheeks collapsed from missing molars. It’s as though fifty years and not eight have gone by. Her mother clutches her meager belongings: a Bible, a silver cup, and a bundle of clothes, as she descends stiffly from the cart. Mother and daughter cling to each other, their roles reversed: it’s the mother returning to the safety of her daughter’s arms, crying into her bosom, no longer hiding the misery of the intervening years.
“Molay,” her mother says, when she can finally speak, “God bless your husband. At first, when I saw him, I thought something happened to you. He took one look around and he understood. ‘Come, let’s go,’ he said. Molay, I was so embarrassed, because your uncle wasn’t pleasant—didn’t even offer water. Then she pipes up behind him to say I owed them money for . . . for breathing, I suppose. Your husband raised his finger.” And she holds up a digit as if testing the wind. “ ‘Not another word,’ he said. ‘This isn’t how my wife’s mother should be living.’ I shook that dust from my feet and didn’t look back.”
Shamuel, grinning, nevertheless scolds the daughter. “Why didn’t you say something to the thamb’ran before? Your mother was living like the women seeking alms outside the church! Just a tiny corner of the verandah for her sleeping mat.”
Her mother drops her head, ashamed. She says, “Your husband put us on the boat. He said he’ll come another way.”
In the room they will soon share she watches her mother take in the teak almirah where she can put her clothes, the writing desk, the dresser with the mirror. Her mother sees her own reflection and self-consciously tucks white strands of hair behind her ears. In the kitchen she serves her mother tea, then quickly grinds coconut, retrieves eggs from the pantry, reheats a fish and a chicken curry, chops beans for a thoren, telling Shamuel not to leave before eating. “Oh, my baby,” her mother says when she’s served, tears trickling down her cheeks. “When have I seen meat and fish and egg together on the same leaf?”
Later, her mother sits on the rope cot watching her. She grabs her daughter as she rushes to and fro. “Stop! No halwa, no laddu, nothing. I want nothing more! Just sit here and let me see you, let me hold you, my precious.” In the way her mother looks at her she sees how much she herself has changed, no longer the child bride her mother last saw, but the capable mother of JoJo, and the mistress of Parambil. Her mother runs her fingers through her daughter’s thick hair that she has missed combing and braiding; she turns her daughter’s face this way and that in front of the lamp. “My little girl is a woman now—” Abruptly her mother pulls back, her eyebrows rising as she takes in the discoloration of the cheeks and across the bridge of the nose, like bat wings. Wide-eyed, she exclaims, “My goodness, molay! You’re with child!”
She knows at once that her mother must be right. Perhaps it isn’t strange that her heart called out for her mother, now that she’s to be one.
At midnight she’s pacing the verandah alone, rejoicing at a reunion she dreamed about, but also praying and worrying. At one in the morning, she sees a distant glow from a torch made of dried, tightly bundled palm fronds.
She runs to greet her husband as if he’s been away for years. She can’t help herself, jumping into his arms like a child, and wrapping her legs around a body that feels like an overheated furnace after his two-day march. He throws aside the torch, and it sparks out against the ground. He holds her. She buries her head against him, overcome with relief. She pleads silently, Never grow old, never die, knowing it’s too much to ask. My rock, my fortress, my deliverer.
He washes by the well. His lids are heavy as he eats dinner. He recounts his route, and she traces his circuitous path on her palm. He has walked for eighteen hours and over fifty miles.
He heads to his bed, too tired to even carry his lamp. She follows him past the threshold of his room. She’s rarely in there without his leading her in. She lies next to him. She takes his hand and puts it on her belly, and smiles at him. He’s puzzled. Then, ever so slowly, understanding shows on his weary features and he smiles. She hears a low exclamation. He squeezes her to him, but then catches himself, fearful of being too rough in his embrace. If God gave her one moment in time that she could stretch out for as long as she lives, this would be it.
She hears his breathing become deeper, steady. His expression is still joyful in sleep, and his hand stays on her belly, cupping his child. In that sheltered, sacred nook between his arm and chest, she’s at peace. “Forgive me, Lord.” She thought her prayers were unanswered. But God’s time isn’t the same as hers. God’s calendar isn’t the one hanging in her kitchen. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
It’s pointless chastising herself for not rescuing her mother sooner. Happened is happened, she thinks. The past is unreliable, and only the future is certain, and she must look to it with faith that the pattern will be revealed.
The girl who shivered at the altar, who now lies beside her husband, who is now with child, cannot see that one day she will be the respected matriarch of the Parambil family. She doesn’t know that in time she’ll earn the label with which JoJo has christened her, the first English word the little fellow learned, and at once offered her, not to tease her about being tiny, but in tribute: “Big.” He called her “Big Ammachi.” She doesn’t know that she’ll soon be Big Ammachi to one and all.
CHAPTER 8
Till Death Do Us Part
1908, Parambil With the birth of her daughter, her previous life is swept away. Her body is at the beck and call of a beloved tyrant who rudely summons her from sleep, demands access, and by sheer force sucks milk from her breasts that are so swollen that she struggles to recognize them as her own.
She finds it hard to remember those nights when it was just JoJo and her, sleeping coiled together, his fingers woven into her hair to ensure that she didn’t abandon him to his recurring nightmare of being adrift on the river. Was there really a time when she had three pots on the fire, one ear cocked for the hen about to lay its egg, and the other for the rustle of rain, so that the drying paddy could be brought in? And all the while pretending to be a tiger for JoJo? Now, she hardly leaves the old bedroom next to the ara, which they had put to use for her labor. Her connection to Parambil feels doubly cemented with a daughter who’ll claim this as home, at least till she marries.