Naturally, when spices fetched the price of precious jewels in Europe, the Arab sailors who brought them from India kept their source a secret for centuries. By the 1400s, the Portuguese (and later the Dutch, the French, and the English) made expeditions to find the land where these priceless spices grew; these seekers were like randy youths who’d caught the scent of a loose woman. Where was she? East, always somewhere east.
But Vasco da Gama went west from Portugal, not east. He sailed along the West African coast, rounded the Horn of Africa, and came back up the other side. Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, da Gama captured and tortured an Arab pilot who led him to the Spice Coast—present-day Kerala—landing near the city of Calicut; his was the longest ocean voyage yet undertaken.
The Zamorin of Calicut was quite unimpressed by da Gama, and by his monarch who sent sea corals and brass as tributes, when the zamorin’s presents were rubies, emeralds, and silk. He found it laughable that da Gama’s stated ambition was to bring Christ’s love to the heathens. Did the idiot not know that fourteen hundred years before his arrival in India, even before Saint Peter got to Rome, another of the twelve disciples—Saint Thomas—had landed just down the coast on an Arab trading dhow?
Legend has it that Saint Thomas arrived in 52 AD, disembarking close to present-day Cochin. He met a boy returning from the temple. “Does your God hear your prayers?” he asked. The boy said his God surely did. Saint Thomas tossed water into the air and the droplets remained suspended. “Can your God do that?” By such displays, whether magic or miracles, he converted a few Brahmin families to Christianity; later he was martyred in Madras. Those first converts—Saint Thomas Christians—stayed true to the faith and did not marry outside their community. Over time they grew, knitted together by their customs and their churches.
Almost two thousand years later, two descendants of those first Indian converts, a twelve-year-old bride and a middle-aged widower, have married.
“Happened is happened,” our young bride will say when she becomes a grandmother, and when her granddaughter—her namesake—begs for a story about their ancestors. The little girl has heard rumors that theirs is a genealogy chock-full of secrets and that her ancestors include slavers, murderers, and a defrocked bishop. “Child, the past is past, and furthermore it’s different every time I remember it. I’ll tell you about the future, the one you will make.” But the child insists.
Where should the story begin? With “Doubting” Thomas, who insisted on seeing Christ’s wounds before he’d believe? With other martyrs to the faith? What the child clamors for is the story of their own family, of the widower’s house into which her grandmother married, a landlocked dwelling in a land of water, a house full of mysteries. But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.
The grandmother is certain of a few things: A tale that leaves its imprint on a listener tells the truth about how the world lives, and so, unavoidably, it is about families, their victories and wounds, and their departed, including the ghosts who linger; it must offer instructions for living in God’s realm, where joy never spares one from sorrow. A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart.
CHAPTER 3
Things Not Mentioned
1900, Parambil
The new bride dreams that she’s splashing in the lagoon with her cousins, piling onto their narrow skiff, deliberately capsizing it, and clambering on again, their laughter echoing off the banks.
She awakes confused.
A snoring mound beside her swells and subsides. Thankamma. Yes. Her first night at Parambil. That name rubs awkwardly over her tongue like the edge of a chipped tooth. From next door, her husband’s room, she hears nothing. Thankamma’s body hides a small boy—she sees only the shiny tousled hair on his head, and a hand, palm up, resting just beyond it.
She listens. Something is missing. The absence is disquieting. It comes to her: she cannot hear water. She’s missing its murmuring, soothing voice, and so she manufactured it in her dream.
Yesterday the vallum, a dugout buttressed across with planks, dropped her and Thankamma at a small jetty. They crossed a long field dotted with towering coconut palms laden with fruit. Four cows grazed, each tethered on a long rope. They walked through rows of banana trees, the floppy leaves nuzzling and knocking against each other. Bunches of red bananas hung down. The air was perfumed by a chempaka tree. Three well-worn, polished rocks served as stepping-stones across a shallow stream. Further up, the stream broadened into a pond whose banks were overgrown with pandanus shrubs and dwarf chenthengu palms laden with orange-colored coconuts. An inclined washing stone sat near the pond’s edge; Thankamma said that spot was where she should come to bathe. The stream’s burble was a sound that augured well. She’d looked for the house when they landed at the jetty, but it wasn’t there by the river, so surely it must be by the stream . . . but she saw nothing. “All this land, over five hundred acres,” Thankamma said proudly, pointing left and right, “is Parambil. Most of it is wild, hilly, not cleared. Of the part that is rough-cleared, only a portion is cultivated. Before your husband tamed it, this was all jungle, molay.”
Five hundred acres. The home she’d known till yesterday sat on barely two.
They’d continued through a trail flanked by tapioca. At last she saw the house, high up on a rise, silhouetted against the light. She stared at what would be her home for the rest of her life. The roofline had the familiar sag in the middle, curving up to the ends; the low overhanging eaves blocked the sun, and shaded the verandah . . . but all she could think about was Why up there? Why not by the stream? Or by the river that brings visitors, news, and all good things?
Now, lying on her back, she studies the room: the oiled, polished walls are of teak, not wild jackwood, with crucifix-shaped openings at the top through which warm air can escape; the false ceiling is also of teak, a buffer against the heat; thin wooden bars across the windows allow the breeze to pass freely; and of course, there’s a split door leading out to the verandah, the upper half now open to admit the breeze, the lower half closed to keep out chickens as well as all legless creatures—it’s much like the house she left behind, only bigger. Every thachan, or carpenter, follows the same ancient Vastu rules, from which neither Hindu nor Christian will deviate. For a good thachan, the house is the bridegroom and the land is the bride, and he must match the two with as much care as the astrologer matches horoscopes. When tragedy or a haunting hangs over a household, people will say it’s because the dwelling was inauspiciously sited. And so she asks herself again: Why here, away from water?
A rustle of leaves, a tremble transmitted through the ground, sends her heart racing. Something near the door blocks the starlight. Is this a household ghost coming to introduce itself? Next, a leafy bush seems to grow into the room through the upper half of the door. A huge snake coils around the bush. She can neither move nor scream, even though she knows something terrible is about to happen to her in this mysterious, landlocked house . . . but would death smell like jasmine?
A swatch of uprooted jasmine hovers above her, held fast by the trunk of an elephant. The florets sway over the sleepers, then pause over her. She feels a warm, moist, ancient breath on her face. Fine soil particles fall on her neck.