JoJo has outgrown the house. Since he avoids water, he cannot challenge the other children in diving or swimming; instead, JoJo rules the heights. Trees are his domain, and he tops the others in his daring and recklessness. He puts monkeys to shame in the way he scampers along a high branch of a tree, jumps to its neighbor, or dismounts by swinging off a vine and doing a backflip before landing on the dead leaves below. That last stunt makes him a hero to the younger children.
On a Tuesday, after being confined by two days of rain, the older children race outside to swim in the river. Only the toddlers are there for an audience as JoJo clambers up a tree, grabs a vine, and swings out. But his hands slip off the wet vine, throwing off his backflip. He’s leaning too far forward when he lands, his momentum forcing him to race forward before he falls facedown into a shallow drainage ditch filled with rainwater. The toddlers applaud the splash, and the added comical touch of JoJo choosing not to stand up and instead to thrash in the puddle like a hooked fish. The little ones are in hysterics, clutching their bellies. That JoJo! The things he can do! But they get bored when JoJo doesn’t get up, and they gradually drift away.
“JoJo is hiding in the water, and he won’t play,” one of them reports to Big Ammachi.
Lulled by feeding Baby Mol, she smiles.
Seconds later, she rips the baby off her nipple. Its arms fly to both sides as if to break a fall. She puts the baby down. “What water?” she screams. “Show me! Where?” The child is startled, but points in the direction of the irrigation ditch and she runs.
She sees JoJo’s shoulder blades and the back of his head cresting the water, his hair wet and glistening, hair that’s such a struggle to wash. She leaps into the turbid ditch, jarring her spine because of its unexpected shallowness—it barely reaches her knees—and flips him onto the ground. She pushes on his stomach and mud surges out of his mouth. She cries, “Breathe, JoJo!” Then she screams. “AYO, JOJO, FOR GOD’S SAKE! BREATHE!” The sound pierces the air, and it carries for a mile. She hears footsteps pounding over wet leaves. Her husband slides down to her, on his knees. He squeezes his son’s ribcage, pushes on the belly. Shamuel arrives breathless and kneels across from the pair, reaching into JoJo’s mouth to sweep out mud, and more mud, but still he doesn’t breathe. Georgie suspends JoJo by the ankles while Ranjan pumps JoJo’s arms up and down and water pours out, but he won’t breathe. Ranjan covers JoJo’s lips with his and blows into his lungs as JoJo hangs upside down, his arms alongside his ears like a fish being weighed . . . but he doesn’t breathe. They lay him down and take turns breathing into his mouth, thumping on his back, pushing on his belly. She circles them like a madwoman, tearing at her hair, crying out in disbelief, screaming at them, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” But JoJo, stubborn in life, is more stubborn in death and will not breathe for her, or his father, or Shamuel, or all others who try; he will not breathe to save their broken hearts. Their efforts seem to be violating his limp body. At last, her husband pushes them away and holds his son to him, groaning, his body shaking.
She registers a distant shrill wail that empties a pair of tiny lungs, then a gasp for air, then another shriek. She has completely forgotten Baby Mol! If you’re crying, that means you’re alive. She backs away, afraid to leave JoJo. She runs back to her room and picks up the infant. She lifts her chatta, shoves a nipple at the baby, alarming it by her brusqueness, making it only wail more. She studies the infant’s face, the bared gums, the ugly mask of its discontent; she resents its blind need for her teat. At last, it latches on.
With the baby at her breast, she stumbles out to see her JoJo, her faithful shadow and companion for eight of his ten years, her little man, lowered down on the verandah bench by his father, the boy’s belly grotesquely distended. Her shattered husband turns and leans his raised arms against a pillar, as if to push it down, but the pillar is the only thing keeping him upright. The expression on JoJo’s face is one of puzzlement. She squats by her son, her hand on his cold forehead, and she wails. Baby Mol’s eyes roll up in fright and she bites sharply on the nipple. Lord, Big Ammachi thinks, I’ll willingly trade this new life if you give me my JoJo back. This thought shames her into a measure of sanity. She reaches out to her husband, still chained to the pillar, as silent in grief as he is in joy.
CHAPTER 9
Faith in Small Things
1908, Parambil
“Drowning on land” is how she thinks of it. In its aftermath she has a recurring nightmare: she’s carrying her children, her mother, and her husband on her head, staggering under the weight, in danger of sinking into the soil if she stops moving, mud filling her mouth. When she arrives at the burden stone, the horizontal slab is on the ground, useless. She looks up and down the road for help, but she’s alone.
Somehow, she goes on, so that Parambil can go on. If her father were there, he’d encourage her to be “faithful in small things.” Nothing ruffled him, not even his own suffering. But she resists this verse. She’s furious with her God. “How can I be faithful in small things if you can’t be faithful in big ones?”
She’s surprised to feel anger toward her grieving husband. It builds within her. At first, like a hornet’s nest, it’s no more than a fleck of mud in a wooden joist. But it grows, and portholes appear, and soon a steady drone can be heard within. She prays for her fury to be lifted. She prays, even though God has failed her, because what else can humans do in such circumstances but pray? “I’ve never seen his lips touch toddy. No one can accuse him of sloth, or miserliness. He has never hit me, and never would. Lord, he doesn’t merit my wrath. He lost his child too. Why do I feel this way?”
She goes to his room after his bath, entrusting the baby to her mother. At this hour, just before dinner, he’s often recumbent, his hand draped over his forehead, as if the act of bathing exhausts him. She recognizes his mannerisms but never truly knows what they signify.
To her surprise, he isn’t lying down but seated on the bed, his shoulders back, his head up, as if he expects her and has steeled himself for what must come.
“I need to know,” she says simply, standing in front of him, their faces on the same level. He tilts his right ear to her. She’s been aware for a while that he hears poorly, but his silence makes it less obvious. She says it again. He watches her lips to see if there’s more.
Any other man would have said, Know what? But not him. She doesn’t wait. “I need to know about”—she wrings her hands in exasperation—“about the Condition.”
She has just christened it. Surely that’s the first step. She’s named this thing that she has sensed from the time the marriage was proposed: the whispers about drownings running in the family, the house built away from water, his distaste for rain, his strange way of bathing—the very things that afflicted their son. The Condition. You can’t ask how to hunt a snake if you don’t have a name for it.
He doesn’t feign ignorance, but he doesn’t move. Seated, he’s still taller than she is, but to her their age gap feels narrower than ever.
“For our daughter’s sake,” she says. “So I can protect her. And for the other children we’ll have, God willing. I need to know what you know. Why was JoJo so fearful of water? Why won’t you, my husband, get on a boat? Does Baby Mol have the Condition too?”