The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer. Her father taught the young bride to say that when she was scared. My rock, and my fortress. A mysterious energy emanating from the altar now settles on her like a surplice, bringing a profound peace. This church is consecrated by one of the twelve; he stood on the ground where she stands, the one apostle who touched Christ’s wounds. She feels an understanding beyond imagination, a voice that speaks without sound or motion. It says, I am with you always.
Then the groom’s bare feet reappear beside her. How beautiful are the feet of the messengers who preach the gospel of peace. But these are brutish feet, callused and impervious to thorns, capable of kicking down a rotting stump, and adept at finding crevices to clamber up a palm tree. His feet shift, knowing they’re being judged. She can’t help herself: she peeks up at him. His nose is as sharp as an axe, the lips full, and the chin thrust out. His hair is jet black, with no gray, which surprises her. He’s much darker than she is, but handsome. She’s astonished by the intensity of his gaze as he stares at the priest: it’s that of a mongoose awaiting the snake’s strike so it can dodge, pivot, and seize it by the neck.
The service must have gone by faster than she realized, because already her mother is helping the groom uncover her head. He moves behind her. He rests his hands on her shoulders as he ties the tiny gold minnu around her neck. His fingers brushing her skin feel as hot as coals.
The groom makes his crude mark in the church register then passes the pen to her. She enters her name and the day, month, and year, 1900. When she looks up he is walking out of the church. The priest watches his receding form and says, “What? Did he leave the rice on the fire?”
Her husband is not at the jetty where a boat bobs and strains impatiently against its mooring.
“From the time your husband was a little boy,” says her new sister-in-law, “he’s preferred his feet to carry him. Not me! Why walk when I can float?” Thankamma’s laughter coaxes them to join in. But now, at the water’s edge, mother and daughter must part. They cling to each other—who knows when they will see each other again? She has a new house-name, a new home, unseen, to which she now belongs. She must renounce the old one.
Thankamma’s eyes are also moist. “You don’t worry,” she says to the distraught mother. “I’ll care for her as if she were my own. I’m going to stay at Parambil two or three weeks. By then she’ll know her household better than her Psalms. Don’t thank me. My children are all grown. I’ll stay long enough for my husband to miss me!”
The young bride’s legs wobble when she peels away from her mother. She might fall if not for Thankamma swinging her onto one hip like a baby, then stepping into the waiting boat. She instinctively wraps her legs around Thankamma’s sturdy waist and presses her cheek to that meaty shoulder. From that perch she gazes back at the forlorn figure waving from the jetty, a figure dwarfed by the giant stone crucifix rising behind her.
The home of the young bride and her widower groom lies in Travancore, at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats—that long mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast. The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam. Where the sea meets white beach, it thrusts fingers inland to intertwine with the rivers snaking down the green canopied slopes of the Ghats. It is a child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds; a vast circulatory system because, as her father used to say, all water is connected. It spawned a people—Malayalis—as mobile as the liquid medium around them, their gestures fluid, their hair flowing, ready to pour out laughter as they float from this relative’s house to that one’s, pulsing and roaming like blood corpuscles in a vasculature, propelled by the great beating heart of the monsoon.
In this land, coconut and palmyra palms are so abundant that at night their frilled silhouettes still sway and shimmer on the interiors of closed eyelids. Dreams that augur well must have green fronds and water; their absence defines a nightmare. When Malayalis say “land” they include water, because it makes no more sense to separate the two than it does to detach the nose from the mouth. On skiffs, canoes, barges, and ferries, Malayalis and their goods flow all over Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar with a swiftness the landlocked cannot imagine. In the absence of decent roads and regular bus transport and bridges, water is the highway.
In our young bride’s time, the royal families of Travancore and Cochin, whose dynasties extend back to the Middle Ages, are under British rule as “princely states.” There are over five hundred princely states under the British yoke—half of India’s land mass—most of them minor and inconsequential. The maharajahs of the larger princely states, or “salute states”—Hyderabad, Mysore, and Travancore—are entitled to anywhere from a nine-to a twenty-one-gun salute, the number reflecting a maharajah’s importance in the eyes of the British (and often equaling the count of Rolls-Royces in the royal’s garage). In exchange for keeping palaces, cars, and status, and for being allowed to govern semiautonomously, the maharajahs pay a tithe to the British out of the taxes they collect from their subjects.
Our bride in her village in the princely state of Travancore has never seen a British soldier or civil servant, a situation quite unlike that in the “presidencies” of Madras or Bombay—territories administered directly by the British and teeming with them. In time, the Malayalam-speaking regions of Travancore, Cochin, and Malabar will come together to form the state of Kerala, a fish-shaped coastal territory at India’s tip, its head pointing to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and its tail to Goa, while the eyes gaze wistfully across the ocean to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and Riyadh.
Push a spade into the soil anywhere in Kerala and rust-tinged water wells up like blood under a scalpel, a rich laterite elixir that nourishes any living thing. One can dismiss the claims that aborted-but-viable fetuses cast away in that soil grow into feral humans, but there’s no arguing that spices flourish here with an abundance unmatched anywhere else in the world. For centuries before Christ, sailors from the Middle East caught the southwesterlies in the lateen sails of their dhows, to land on the “Spice Coast” and buy pepper, clove, and cinnamon. When the trade winds reversed, they returned to Palestine, selling the spices to buyers from Genoa and Venice for small fortunes.
The spice craze swept over Europe like syphilis or the plague and by the same means: sailors and ships. But this infection was salutary: spices extended the life of food and whoever consumed it. There were other benefits. In Birmingham, a priest who chewed cinnamon to mask his wine breath found himself irresistible to female parishioners and pseudonymously penned the popular pamphlet Newe Sauces Swete and Sharp: A Merrie Gallimaufry of Couplings Uncouthe and Pleasant for Man and his Wyf. Apothecaries celebrated the miraculous cure of dropsy, gout, and lumbago by potions of turmeric, kokum, and pepper. A Marseilles physician discovered that rubbing ginger on a small, flaccid penis reversed both states, and for the partner procured “such pleasure that she objects to him getting off her again.” Strangely, it never occurred to Western cooks to dry roast and grind together peppercorn, fennel seed, cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon, then throw that spice mix into oil along with mustard seed, garlic, and onions to make a masala, the foundation of any curry.