“No, it isn’t. It’s some other elephant. Send him away.” He walks off, meandering a bit before finding his way to his room, thanks to Baby Mol.
At dinner time, Damodaran lumbers up to the house, ignoring the fresh coconut fronds Unni gathered for him. He seems to be waiting for the thamb’ran to emerge, perhaps to complain about being called an impostor. Big Ammachi takes a bucket of rice and ghee to Damo. He ignores it.
She makes her husband’s favorite dish, erechi olarthiyathu. When he sits down at the table for dinner, on the verandah of the old section of the house, he doesn’t seem to notice that Damo has made his way there, though Damo is impossible to ignore. As usual, as soon as the sizzling meat touches the banana leaf, her husband can’t resist sampling it before she can serve rice. But then, to her utter astonishment, he spits it out. Since his lips don’t seal well, he has a mess on his chin. He flings what’s on the leaf to the muttam.
“This isn’t fit for dogs!”
Caesar, their newest pye-dog, disagrees, racing up to lick the meat cubes off the pebbles. Damodaran steps closer.
“Ayo! Why did you do that?” She’s never before raised her voice to her husband. She tastes the meat. “For goodness’ sake, there’s nothing wrong with this! What got into you? I’ve been frying this dish just this way for nearly a quarter century!”
“Aah, isn’t that my point? You’ve been making this dish for so long. You think by now you wouldn’t make a careless mistake. So it must be deliberate.”
She looks at him in disbelief. This man who hardly speaks, and never harshly, now lances her with his words. “All these years I wanted you to talk more! I should’ve been grateful for your silence.” She turns her back and walks away seething, another first. She finds Damo looking right at her, his trunk held curled in his mouth. Forgive your husband, he knows not what he does. She hears it as clearly as if she’d heard a human voice.
Heeding this, she returns from the kitchen with vegetable, and pickle. He hardly eats. She holds the kindi for him, directing the spout over his fingers as he rinses off. He walks stiffly to his room, passing Baby Mol as he does so. Big Ammachi realizes that for once, Baby Mol wasn’t by her father’s side at dinner. Instead, she’d retreated to her bench. Her tears are gone and she’s happy, chattering to her dolls instead of obsessively tailing her father. He pauses, looking down at Baby Mol, expecting his daughter to latch onto him as she’s done for days now. But Baby Mol looks right through him.
Big Ammachi checks on her husband after covering the embers in the kitchen. She’s still smarting from earlier. He’s in bed, staring at the ceiling. She sits by him. He looks at her and asks if he can have some water. The glass is by his side. She holds it out to him. He rises up and, in the manner of a child, he covers her fingers on the glass with both his hands. His hands are powerful, but gnarled and weathered by age, callused from the trees he has climbed, and the ropes, axes, and shovels he has wielded. Together they raise the glass to his mouth, and he drinks. Her hand, dwarfed by his, is no longer that of the girl who came to Parambil a lifetime ago; it bears scars from the sparks of countless wood fires, and from splattering oil. Her knobby fingers show the wear and tear of endless chopping, grinding, peeling, mincing, pickling . . . Their overlapping hands bracket their many years together as husband and wife. When not a drop remains, he releases his grip, lies back down, sighs, and closes his eyes.
She leaves him after a while. She’ll check on him after putting Baby Mol and Philipose to bed. But despite her best intentions she falls asleep with her children. She wakes up in the middle of the night and gets up to look in on her husband as has been her habit for some months now. His dark form is very still. When she touches him, his skin is cold. Even before she lights the lamp, she knows he’s gone.
His face is still, his expression troubled and penitent. In the silence, she feels her heart beating furiously, feels it strain at its moorings, trying to tear free of her chest and beat for him, because the heart of Parambil that toiled for so many years cannot do it any longer.
Weeping quietly, she climbs onto the bed and lies next to her husband, gazing at the face she’d first glimpsed at the altar and had been terrified of, and then loved so fiercely, her silent husband who’d been so steadfast in his love for her. All around her, the sounds of the land he made his and where he lived his life feel sharper and exaggerated: the chirp of crickets, the croaking of frogs, the rustle of foliage. Then she hears a prolonged trumpet, a lament from Damo for the man who rescued him when he was wounded, for a good man who is no more.
Her husband would be pleased that he didn’t have to receive or converse with the many mourners who stream into the house, all the relatives and the craftsmen whose lives and fortunes he altered so profoundly. The Nairs from the tharavad on the edge of Parambil come to pay their respects. All the pulayar are there too, from every house, standing silent on the muttam, their faces dark with sadness. Shamuel is chief among them, shattered and weeping—Shamuel whom she’d led inside to the bedroom despite his protests, so he could take his final leave of the thamb’ran he worshipped. Her husband would have been impatient with the funeral, wanting nothing more than to be in the earth he so loved, to lie beside his first wife and his firstborn son.
A few weeks after they bury him, as life at Parambil struggles to find its new normal, she hears the sounds of digging and scratching in the courtyard just as she’s about to fall asleep. It stops. The next night, she hears it once more. She goes out to sit on the verandah, facing the sound. “Listen,” she says, “you must forgive me. I chastise myself for not coming to you after putting the children to bed. I fell asleep. I’m sorry we argued at dinner. I overreacted. Yes, I too wish it had been different. But it was just one night out of so many that were perfect, was it not? I hoped for many more perfect nights but each was a blessing. And listen: I forgive you. After a lifetime of goodness together, you were more than entitled to a tantrum. So be at peace!”
She listens. She knows he has heard her. Because, as was always his way, he expresses his love for her the only way he knows how: through his silence.
CHAPTER 26
Invisible Walls
1926, Parambil When her son is nearly three, she takes him by boat to Parumala Church, where Mar Gregorios, the only saint of the Saint Thomas Christians, is entombed. Philipose is delighted by his first boat ride, but she keeps a close eye on him. Neither her husband nor JoJo could ever be persuaded to get on a boat, whereas this one cannot see water without wanting to challenge it. His friends dart around the pond like fish. He doesn’t understand why he is unable to do the same. It makes him fiercely determined like a fire ant to overcome the obstacle. His many attempts at “swimming” terrify his mother; his failures are pathetic to watch.
The saint’s tomb is to one side of the nave of Parumala Church. Above it is a life-size photograph of Mar Gregorios; this image (or else the widely reproduced portrait by the artist Raja Ravi Varma) is on calendars and framed posters in every Saint Thomas Christian household. Mar Gregorios’s beard outlines delicate lips, and his white sidelocks frame a handsome, kindly face with eyes that look surprisingly youthful. He alone had advocated for the pulayar to be converted and welcomed into their churches, but it didn’t happen in his lifetime. She doesn’t think it will happen in hers.
Her little boy is awestruck by the church, and more so by the saint’s tomb with the hundreds of candles before it. He tugs at his mother’s mundu. “Ammachi, ask him to help me swim.” His mother doesn’t hear him; she stands with her head covered, gazing up into the saint’s face. She’s in a trance.