Dolly Kochamma, without being asked, moved in during the last stages of her confinement, to help with the household tasks and with JoJo. Quiet and easygoing, Dolly never speaks of the challenges she and Georgie face. On his small plot of land, the gregarious Georgie should grow enough coconuts, tapioca, and bananas to live on, and even have a small profit, but somehow, they barely get by. Shamuel says it is from poor planning, along with his weakness for schemes such as planting wheat instead of rice, because it was less work, only to find wheat grew poorly and there was little market for it. Georgie must know he is a disappointment to his uncle and so he stays away, but every morning, when the baby falls asleep after her ten o’clock feeding, Dolly Kochamma oils the new mother’s hair, and massages her with spiced coconut oil. When Big Ammachi thanks her profusely, Dolly says, “Your husband rescued us when we had nothing and I was pregnant with my first child. JoJo’s mother did this for me. Now, you’re doing me a favor, allowing me to be of use.” Dolly encourages her to go to the stream and bathe properly. “Don’t worry. Baby Mol”—for now the child has no name other than “Baby Girl”—“won’t stop breathing in your absence.”
Meanwhile her mother has taken over the kitchen. The hollow-cheeked, gray-haired woman who stepped down so gingerly from the bullock cart has a decade’s worth of bottled-up thoughts to share, even if she doesn’t have quite the energy she once did.
JoJo doesn’t understand why his Big Ammachi spends so much time with the baby, or why he must be quiet when the baby sleeps. One morning his jealousy drives him to climb high up the plavu and cry for help as though he’s stuck up the tree. When he’s ignored, he’s furious, and comes down, wraps his valuables in a thorthu, and announces his permanent relocation to Dolly Kochamma’s house. Dolly and Georgie indulge him; their children spread a mat for him next to theirs. This is how JoJo spends his first night away from Parambil, praying the place will fall apart in his absence.
When word comes the next day that his Big Ammachi misses him, JoJo races back, but he slows at the threshold, pretending he’s returning only under duress. His mother smothers him with kisses till he’s forced to give up his fa?ade. “You’re my little man! How can I go down to the cellar for pickles without you? That ghost welcomes me as long as you’re there.” Her little man invites his new friends over, and soon the muttam echoes with the sounds of children laughing and playing; the cacophony reminds her of her own childhood, surrounded by the constant sounds of cousins and neighbors. Thankfully, Baby Mol sleeps through most anything. Now and then, while nursing Baby Mol, she’ll hear one of the children wailing. In the past, she’d have raced out to investigate, but now she tells herself, “A crying child is a breathing child.”
After a month she moves back to her bedroom, preferring the familiarity of the bamboo mat she unrolls on its floor to the raised bed in the original bedroom next to the ara where she gave birth. Baby Mol is beside her atop a folded towel, while JoJo and her mother sleep on their mats on her other side. In the mornings, each mat is rolled up around its pillow and the bedrolls stacked on a raised ledge.
Every evening, after his bath, her husband appears at the threshold of her room. Her mother, if she’s there, feigns a task in the kitchen and disappears. Words may escape the mountain, but only when he’s alone with his wife. His biceps bulge as he brings the bundle of cloth and flesh that is his infant to his bare chest, while the new mother marvels at the sight of Baby Mol swallowed by his huge, callused hands. “Are you eating well?” she asks. “Yes, ‘Big Ammachi,’ ” he says, teasing her. “But your mother’s erechi olarthiyathu isn’t as good as yours.” He isn’t aware that he’s paid her a compliment she cherishes.
She recalls Thankamma saying her brother was like a coconut: fibrous and forbidding on the outside but with precious layers within; its water soothes babies with gripe, while the tender white flesh is vital for every Malayali dish; that same flesh when dried and pressed—copra—yields coconut oil; the discards from pressing copra are fodder for cattle; the hard shell makes a perfect thavi, or ladle; and the thick outer cover, when dried and spun, yields coir rope. Life would cease in Travancore without the coconut, just as Parambil would stop without her husband. But his saying her mother’s erechi olarthiyathu is “not as good as yours” is his way of saying that he misses her.
At night, after she puts the baby to sleep, her blouse sodden and smelling of her own milk, she wonders if there are nights when her husband comes seeking her while she’s asleep. Does he touch her, try to shake her awake? Or does the sight of her mother and the two sleeping children halt him at the door? The truth is, she isn’t ready for him. The ordeal of labor is fresh in her memory. She was left with a tear that is finally less painful, but her body is still offering strange new embarrassments that thankfully seem to diminish with time. It will be a while before she’s fully healed. Every month some story reaches her of a birth gone awry, a woman bleeding to death, or a baby stalled during its exit, an event that is fatal to mother and child. “Thank you, Lord, for bringing me through this unscathed.” She doesn’t share with the Lord that she misses the closeness with her husband, misses the excitement of getting on his bed, her heart pounding, and hearing his heart do the same. “Well, you can’t have one without the other,” she says, but just to herself. There are certain things that God does not need to be told.
The rhythm of Parambil is one of constancy and constant change. JoJo excitedly reports that Georgie’s twin brother, Ranjan, along with his wife and three children, appeared in the night with all their worldly possessions. Big Ammachi can hardly imagine Dolly’s plight with so many crammed into her tiny house. Ranjan, like Georgie, was left nothing by his father. He found a decent job as an assistant manager on a tea estate in Coorg. The pay was good, but theirs was a lonely existence in the Pollibetta hills. Something happened that caused the wife to restrain her husband with rope, throw him in a cart, and bring the family down the mountain and eventually descend on Georgie and Dolly Kochamma. The wife, a stout woman with a square jaw, and the habit of squeezing her eyes shut before speaking, appears formidable, more so because she wears a large wooden crucifix that would look better nailed to a wall than hanging over her bosom. She carries a Bible tightly clasped in her hand as though fearful someone will rip it free. Dolly’s children secretly call her “Decency Kochamma,” because (according to JoJo) everything looks indecent to her. If she isn’t railing against a sin the children have committed, she’s railing against one they’re about to commit.
A few days later, Big Ammachi sees the twins walking up to call on their uncle, holding hands the way close friends do. They are identical, but Ranjan looks rougher for the wear. He shares his brother’s boyish fidgetiness, as though an eccentric wheel turns within, producing a restless dance of his lips, eyebrows, eyes, and limbs and affecting his gait. Both men have the same expression of unwarranted optimism, despite their circumstances—an admirable trait. They try to act solemn just before they go in to see her husband, but when they emerge, they are elated, bouncing off each other like boys let out of school. She learns later that her husband has deeded Ranjan a small, sloped, uncleared plot that sits adjacent to Georgie’s. He’d probably decided on it when he first heard of his nephew’s return; so now he has provided for Ranjan as well as Georgie. She admires her husband’s generosity, but he struggles to match it with warmth, or with the kind of wise counsel that might help his nephews be more successful. That is not his way.
JoJo reports that the twins have decided to tear down Georgie and Dolly’s small home and build a new joint dwelling using the best wood and good brass fittings—just the sort of house that the long-suffering Dolly Kochamma deserves, but it’s happening only because Ranjan and Decency Kochamma are throwing in their savings. The new foundation will sit mostly on Georgie’s plot, which has the well and the best drainage; most of Ranjan’s plot will go to a new approach road, and to grow kappa and plantain. A shared kitchen will sit between the two wings of the house. Big Ammachi can’t help worrying for Dolly Kochamma.