The change in Digby’s expression when he sees Mariamma, his transition back to the present, reminds her of her father: often when she came up to him, she felt she’d summoned him back from an unfathomable place. The two men had this in common: they loved her mother. Mariamma stands beside Digby; they gaze out through the glass.
He speaks as if she’s never fled the room. “Your mother suns herself here at this time in the morning.” His voice is soft, wistful. “She comes through the fence gate, counts five steps to the center of the lawn. I grow these roses just for her. Her sense of smell is intact, thank goodness. She can name thirty species just by their perfume.” He’s like a parent bragging about a child’s new skill. “When she tires of the sun, she’ll take seven steps to this window and place both her hands on the glass and stay there for almost a minute, whether I’m here or not.” He smiles sheepishly. “It’s a little ritual of hers. Or ours. She’s never explained it to me. I think it’s like a blessing, a prayer she sends to me in the middle of the day, to tell me she loves me, that she’s thankful for me.” He smiles dreamily. “If I’m here, I put my hand on the glass, over hers. I think she knows when I do that. Then, whether I’m here or not, she leaves.”
“Does she know I’m here?”
“No!” he says quickly. “No. When you came to see Lenin, I never told her. It’s the only time in twenty-five years I’ve hidden something from her.”
“Why?”
He sighs and closes his eyes. He’s a long time answering. “Because her whole life has been about keeping this secret. Try to put yourself in her shoes, Mariamma. Imagine her right after Ninan’s awful death. Philipose . . . your father . . . blames her, and she blames him. After the funeral, she flees Parambil. Soon after, Chandy dies. Friends of hers, concerned about her mental state, bring her up to the hills to distract her. She’s full of rage and sorrow, tempted even to end her life. Quite by accident she discovers my attempts at sculpting, my tools. She takes her anger out with hammer and chisel and I think it saves her. She stays on with me after her friends leave. We become close . . . we fall in love. She gets word that Baby Mol is very ill and for that reason alone she goes to visit Parambil for a few days. She gets trapped there in a historic monsoon. During that time, she realizes two things: she’s with child. And the leprosy makes itself known to her, becomes explosive—you know how it can do that in pregnancy. Your father at this point . . . wasn’t at his best. Opium. She sees no way ahead, no good outcome. Whether she comes to me or stays there, she can’t be around you—that she knows from growing up next to Saint Bridget’s, from being around Rune. It would put you in danger. She and your father keep their distance. But he sees her in terrible distress one night, and he comforts her, and it leads him to want intimacy. She doesn’t stop him. When her pregnancy is obvious, in his altered state, he thinks it’s his child. She comes to a decision: Once she gives birth to you, she must vanish. She must die. You must all think her dead if she’s not to taint you forever, taint Parambil. Her only consolation is that she knows that she can’t do better than leaving you in Big Ammachi’s care at Parambil.”
“But if my father or Big Ammachi had known, they’d have taken care of her, they—”
He’s shaking his head. “How long before the fisherwoman no longer brought her basket around, and your relatives avoided the house? What this disease does to flesh is bad enough, but the fear of contagion rips families apart. Every week we take in mothers chased out by husbands. Fathers ejected and stoned by their sons. Only here do they all find a home.”
Mariamma wants to argue, to protest. But the truth is, if she weren’t a physician, would she even be inside these walls? She is a physician, a disciple of Hansen; she’s someone who has dissected leprous tissue; she knows the enemy . . . and still her first reaction was horror and repulsion at seeing her mother. Digby said, “Put yourself in her shoes,” but she finds it impossible to see herself in those thick-soled sandals cut from rubber tires; impossible to imagine living through the nightmare her mother has lived, and still lives through. As her mother turns her sightless face to the sun, Mariamma shivers.
Digby continues, “This disease ostracizes innocent children and she didn’t want you growing up tarred by the label she carries. Better you think she was dead than see your mother this way. Being here is as good as being dead,” he says bitterly. “Your loved ones will never see you again. They never want to. We never get relatives visiting. Ever. You might be the first. She staged her drowning and had me pick her up downstream. I wanted to keep her at my estate, but she refused. To keep her terrible secret there was only one place she could safely be. Here. As for me, I had no choice. I wasn’t going to lose her again.”
“Who else knows?”
“Only Cromwell. And now you. Cromwell is a brother to me. He’s made our life here possible. He was already running the estate, and now it’s entirely his. My estate friends think I found Jesus and that’s why I’m here. It turned out, I was needed at Saint Bridget’s. The Swedish mission struggled to find physicians or nurses willing to work here for long. The prejudice is too great. I was already familiar with Saint Bridget’s. Things had deteriorated after Rune’s death. There was much to do.
“The hardest blow was when your mother’s sight failed. Now I read to her every night. When we learned about your father’s passing, she was heartbroken. She stopped working. Mourned for days, wept for him. For you. She lives and breathes her guilt every day, but once you were orphaned, it reached new heights. That’s the only kind of pain your mother can feel now, pain of the soul. The agony of having to vanish from the earth to protect the ones she loves. All her art revolves around you, Mariamma, around the pain of giving you up. Your poor mother could only express her love by erasing herself, by becoming faceless, anonymous, unknown to her child. I see that in her sculptures, in the way they express the pain of having to hide her face, never being able to show it, being dead to you so you could live.”
She weeps hearing these words. She had all the mothering and the kisses she could have wanted from Big Ammachi, her father, Anna Chedethi, and Baby Mol. They doted on her. Her tears are because she missed her real mother, who was here all this time. Yes, she misses that woman on the lawn, misses the mother that Elsie might have been, if not for the leprosy. There’s a chasm in my life of all these intervening years, our separate lives.
Digby hands her an immaculate handkerchief. Mariamma takes it, grateful. She composes herself as best she can and she studies this man who fathered her, who came here to be with the woman he loved.
“You had to give up the world too, Digby.”
“The world? Ha!” His bitter laugh is out of character. He turns to her. “No, no. I gave up something far bigger, Mariamma. I gave up you. I gave up the chance to know my only child. I longed to know you. That’s not just her wound. It’s mine too, you know.”
Mariamma is shaken by the intensity of his emotion, by the anger and ache in his voice. She cannot hold his gaze.
“The only thing that eased the pain of not having you with us is that we had each other. And I was a surgeon of sorts again—I was paying Rune back too for what he did for me—while Elsie never stopped being an artist. Your mother and I have had a quarter century together! It’s been hard. When we came here, she was still a beautiful woman. And so strong! The force of her mind, the quality of her work . . . I wish you’d seen her in her prime. My heart breaks with every setback. Look at what time and Hansen’s bloody disease have done to her,” he says bitterly. “But at night, in each other’s arms, we try to forget. I’ll take that, Mariamma.”
She doesn’t know what to say about this kind of love. She’s envious.