Afterward, they collapse, drenched in colored sweat, their release like a drug that keeps them from moving from the tarp on the unyielding floor and going to his bed. They drift off, their bodies juxtaposed, a smeared canvas.
Why am I leaving him? There was a reason, but sleep overtakes Celeste before she can remember. She turns to one side, feeling chilled as the sweat evaporates. She drags the emerald sari off the table—his still life be damned—and she covers herself.
When Digby wakes, his head pounds; it is a huge effort to open his eyes. The room is unusually bright, a dancing ethereal haze. Pigments riot over his naked body, the violence of it unsettling.
He smells smoke. He turns his head and the mystery is solved: they must have knocked over the paraffin candle in their sleep. He scrabbles around to find it, but then he notices, as if from afar, an optical illusion: his hand is blue and the skin hangs down, like honey pouring off a ledge. All is blue: the floor, the tarp on which he sleeps, the easel, the canvas on it. He wants to laugh at the strange sight. Laugh in disbelief. The melted paraffin has found a mound of turpentine-soaked rags, and blue flames scale the walls.
He turns to see an even stranger sight: the silk sari he uses as a backdrop is on the floor, but it is alive, writhing. It is coral and ginger and olive green, and beneath it, he registers at last, is Celeste, fighting to break free. He lunges for the sari, pulling it away even as the burning, melting silk sticks to his flesh, but he refuses to let her go. If he can only peel it off, restore the beautiful cloth to where it sat draped next to the earthen pot, next to the fruit, its folds spilling to the floor, if he can only restore it to the way it was, the way it should be—Still Life with Mangoes—then all will be well. He is sure of it.
Part Three
CHAPTER 23
What God Knew Before We Were Born
1913, Parambil
In the aftermath of JoJo’s passing, Big Ammachi feels flung off the wheel of life, struggling to find her rhythm. The cock crows every morning before she’s ready to wake; the barber walks up to the house before she remembers it is the first of the month. Were it not for her mother managing the kitchen, they’d all be foraging for food like the estate’s chickens.
Parambil has lost its sole male heir, lost the child she still thinks of as her firstborn, even if he did not come from her womb. But the loss is not hers alone. The first time she goes down to the cellar, an empty pickling urn falls off a shelf above her head without any provocation. She’d seen it out of the corner of her eye and pulled her head back in time for it to shatter on the floor at her feet. She flees up the stairs, only to be met by the sight of her fearless husband looking frightened, gazing past her and down into the cellar. So you knew she was there all this time? The expression on his face drives her into a fury. How dare this spirit that she has treated so hospitably intimidate her husband? Big Ammachi charges back down the steep stairs and she ignores the broken shards poking at her soles. She grabs an empty urn with a strength she did not know she had and launches it toward the room’s shadowy corner. “JoJo was mine too, you know?” she shouts. “I had him for longer than you! If you can make an urn fall on me, why didn’t you pick JoJo up as soon as he fell in the water?” She thinks she hears faint sobs. Her anger subsides. She leaves. But it doesn’t end there. A few days later she finds a syrup-soaked urn overturned, and the cellar swarms with the big red ants whose stings are excruciatingly painful. Big Ammachi wraps her feet in cloth and, lighting a torch of dried palm fronds, she drives the ants back with the flames, coming dangerously close to setting the cellar on fire before she douses the torch in a bucket. She mops the floor and then goes over it once more with kerosene. “Keep this up and I’m calling the achen. Is that how you want to be remembered? Not as a good mother, but as a poltergeist we had to drive out?” A truce holds in the cellar, but in the kitchen her curries taste strange in her reliable clay pots. The milk she inoculates each night for yogurt turns bad. She endures these provocations until gradually they subside. But the heartbeat of Parambil remains irregular. Neither prayers nor church nor tears restore the cadence.
In that same unsettled period, and much too soon after their loss, her husband shows up silently outside her door at night while her mother and the baby are fast asleep. She senses him and sits up, surprised. She isn’t ready. JoJo’s scent is still so strong in this room, and his imprint lingers on the mat beside her. Her husband too seems unsure; he doesn’t extend his hand but just fills the doorway. She doesn’t move. His being there feels like sacrilege. He leaves. The next day he ignores her. Then she understands: this is about Parambil needing a male heir too. Even so, she needs time.
She finds solace and sanity in her garden behind the kitchen. When she first came to Parambil, she noticed her kid goat nibbling the berries on a scraggly bush by the back steps and becoming noticeably frisky. She investigated, and the berry’s scent gave it away. After careful pruning and fertilizing, the bush now towers over her, providing Parambil with coffee. The dark brew has an oily shimmer on its surface and an unexpected bite; it is a reminder that the sweetness of life comes with bitterness. But her banana trees are her real delight. She began with a tiny sucker off a poovan varietal from Dolly Kochamma. Now she has a personal grove of trees, fed by the runoff from the kitchen roof. The leaves block the afternoon sun and make a rustling, knocking sound in the wind that comforts her. She harvests the bunches while they are still green, letting them ripen in the cool of the pantry. The miniature poovan delights her daughter; the child’s father can eat ten at one sitting. She marvels that the earth provides such a delicious bounty with nothing more than water, sunlight, and her love. For each tree, the day arrives that she must hack it down, feeding the corpse to the cows and goats. From the brood of suckers around the stump she cuts away all but one lucky one that begins the miracle all over again, carrying inside it the memory of its ancestors.
She still hasn’t baptized Baby Mol. In her dialogues with God, she avoids the topic but she senses God’s disapproval. One evening she addresses the issue head-on. “How do you expect me to walk past the grave of one child and then go inside to baptize another?” Besides, she has doubts about a ritual meant to confer grace, which she understands as God’s inherent love, benevolence, and forgiveness. “Grace didn’t save JoJo.” God is silent.
One night, she awakes to see her husband once again at the foot of her mat, silent, so as not to rouse her mother or Baby Mol. How long has he been there? He holds out his hand, and this time she rises. She feels the familiar acuity of hearing and sight as he pulls her quietly to her feet. She didn’t realize how much she had missed this closeness. Their task is both tender and urgent.