He stands up, towering over her, and her heart races. He’s never come close to threatening her. She braces herself. But he steps past her to reach up and retrieve a parcel wedged on the ledge just under the ceiling. It’s wrapped in cloth and tied with a string. He holds it outside the door and shakes off the dust.
“It was hers,” he says, as though that’s sufficient explanation. He sits beside her and unwraps the disintegrating coarse hemp cloth around it. The second layer is the cloth of a fine kavani. She gets the scent of a bygone era, and of another woman, the same scent that is in the cellar at times, and that was on the stored garments he gave her when he first took her to church. JoJo’s mother. On top of the pile is a gauzy, transparent cotton pouch that she can see holds a wedding ring as well as the minnu—the tiny, gold pendant in the shape of a tulsi leaf, with gold beads forming a crucifix on its surface. He tied this around his departed wife’s neck when they married, just as he tied her own minnu around her neck on their wedding day.
He moves the pouch aside and hands her a small square sheet: JoJo’s baptismal record. She’s wrenched with guilt seeing this, as though at this moment she’s breaking the news to JoJo’s mother of her son’s death. She fights back tears. She doesn’t dare look at her husband. Her anger has vanished.
Now his big hand lifts out a folded wad of papers, crumpled at the edges. The silverfish have chewed at the corners, while the paper beetles have made crescent-shaped fenestrations through it. Gingerly he unfolds the fragile parchment. It is an outsized map or chart made up of papers glued on their long sides, but the rice-paste glue, so delicious to silverfish, is largely eaten away. He spreads it out over both their laps. The writing is faded. A few more years and these papers will be just dust.
A tree. The thick, dark trunk is crooked, and on the branches are a few leaves. The leaves have names, dates, annotations. She recalls a similar genealogy drawn by her father. She’d sat on his lap as he explained. “Matthew gives us the genealogy of Jesus beginning with Abraham. Fourteen generations to David, then fourteen from David to the Babylonian Captivity, and another fourteen from the exile to the birth of Jesus.” Her father was convinced Matthew had omitted two generations. “He was a tax collector. He liked the symmetry of fourteen repeated thrice. But it’s inaccurate!”
The tree on her lap lacks symmetry and is devastatingly accurate. She understands at once that it is a catalog of the malady that has shattered the Parambil family, but unlike Matthew’s gospel, this is a secret document, hidden in the rafters, to be viewed only by family members, and only when they absolutely must see it. Did it take the loss of their son for her to earn the right to this knowledge? She’s had a child with this man! They are bound by blood, yet he kept this from her.
She brings the lamp as close as she dares. Surely this fresher writing that recorded JoJo’s birth must be JoJo’s mother’s—why was she allowed to see this? Did she already know of the Condition and ask? Other hands, some old and tremulous, as evidenced by the hitches in the loops, coils, and uprights of the Malayalam script, have laboriously penned entries too. Perhaps her husband’s mother, or his grandmother? And someone else before that, and before that. There are also smaller slips of ancient, coarse paper inside the folded map.
He peers over her shoulder, his hands clenched.
Using JoJo’s name printed on a branch as anchor, she sees that the Parambil lineage goes back at least seven generations (not counting the slips of paper) and forward two. She is entering unfamiliar backwaters. The past is as murky as the ghostly faint ink, the crumbling paper. The ancestral family boasts slave traders, two murderers, and the apostate priest Pathrose—it says so here. Next to one name she reads, “Just like his uncle, but younger”—she struggles to decipher the letters so closely crammed together—“and so never married.” An annotation next to a “Pappachen” three generations before her husband says, “His father, Zachariah, also deaf and staggered when eyes closed from the age of forty.” A loose note says: “Boys suffer more often than girls. Watch for exuberant children, fearless except for water. By the time they are taken to the river, all you mothers will know.”
They’re describing JoJo. Which mother wrote this warning?
She turns back to the tree, to a symbol that recurs on some branches.
“What are these squiggles under this strange crucifix?” she asks.
“Are they not words?” he says softly.
She turns to him, stunned. For the longest time she has read the paper to him at the dinner table, but has never seen him read. She assumed he never cared to. He cannot read! How could she not know this till this moment? The innocence of his question reminds her of JoJo when she first met him, and she fights back tears.
She shakes her head. “No. It’s not words.” He says, “Then it looks like water. With a cross.”
She is in awe of her husband. He is illiterate, yet he saw it for what it was, just as he might see a dusting of mold on a tree trunk. “True,” she says softly. “A cross over water. A sign they died by drowning.”
He says, “Is Shanthama there? My father’s older sister?” She finds her, and points: the cross on water is by her name. “She drowned before I was born.”
Which grief-stricken mother thought up this symbol? Under the dancing flame of her lamp, the crucifix atop the wavy lines also resembles a denuded tree at the head of a fresh mound of dirt: a grave.
“There’s a death by drowning every generation,” she says, tracing with her finger. A few of the crosses have annotations, and she reads aloud: “In the lake . . . the stream . . . the Pamba River . . .”
Her husband points with his chin in the direction of their sorrow. “Irrigation ditch.” It will be her task to write those words.
How much did the marriage broker know about the Condition? What about her mother or uncle? Did they know and conceal it from her? Or dismiss it? But of course her husband knew. She doesn’t want to hate the man she loves. But she has to get it off her chest.
“I wish you’d told me what you knew,” she says. “We could have protected JoJo, forbidden him from swinging on those things, climbing trees so—”