Koshy Saar’s response is indignant. “It’s fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”
Fittingly, the monsoon comes to Travancore just as the Pequod sinks. In Parambil they don’t notice the rain hammering down because Queequeg’s coffin has become a life buoy for Ishmael, while Queequeg is last seen clinging to the mast. Four heads huddle under the lamp and over a book that only one of them can read. “God keep their souls,” Odat Kochamma says when it is over; Baby Mol is despondent, and Big Ammachi crosses herself. She’s come to love Queequeg. She thinks of Shamuel, and how that word, “pulayan,” diminishes him when, like Queequeg, he’s superior to nearly every man she knows. The goodness in Shamuel’s heart, his industry and dedication to doing things well, would be fine qualities for the twins—Georgie and Ranjan—to have, for example. She’s past feeling guilty about being in the thrall of this lie-that-tells-the-truth that is Moby-Dick.
“Koshy Saar doesn’t believe in God,” Philipose confesses the night he returns from his lesson with a new book. Clearly he has been keeping his mentor’s atheism a secret till they finished Moby-Dick. He looks guilty, fearful his mother will put an end to his visits, but eased of his troubled conscience.
She hungrily eyes the new book in his hand—Great Expectations—the novel that will define 1934 just as Moby-Dick has defined 1933. “Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it’s a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?”
CHAPTER 29
Morning Miracles
1936, Parambil
On a stormy weekday, Big Ammachi is full of misgivings as her teenager slouches to school and into the early-morning darkness. In his sleepy shoulders, she sees no hint of his father. The son is more delicate—more sapling than tree trunk. She stifles an urge to call him back because he stepped over the threshold with his left foot as he departed—why invite bad luck? But then to summon a person back once they have embarked on a journey is worse luck.
“Ammachi?” she hears from behind her, as her daughter stirs. She waits anxiously for what Baby Mol says next. Her daughter’s gift of announcing visitors ahead of their arrival extends to predicting bad weather, disaster, and death. “Ammachi, the sun is coming up!” Big Ammachi lets out her breath in relief. For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.
After breakfast Baby Mol holds up her broad palm and Big Ammachi counts out three beedis. No self-respecting Christian woman smokes, though some chew tobacco and old women treasure their little opium boxes. No one knows who got Baby Mol into the beedi habit and Baby Mol won’t say. But the joy it gives her makes it hard to object to her daily three-beedi allotment. Her mother can’t imagine a world where her daughter isn’t on her bench, her wizened face smiling as she sings to her rag dolls. The muttam is the stage that entertains her. When parboiled rice is left out to dry, no scarecrow can match Baby Mol’s vigilance.
“Where’s my pretty baby?” Baby Mol asks. Her mother reminds her that he’s gone to school. “What a pretty baby he is!” Baby Mol says, giggling.
“True. But not as pretty as you.”
Baby Mol laughs aloud, a hoarse sound of delight. “I know,” she says modestly.
But then, out of nowhere, a shadow falls across Baby Mol’s face. She says, “Something has happened to our baby!”
The sky is low and as heavy as wet sheets on a sagging clothesline as Philipose walks to school. The high, mossy embankments on either flank form a dark tunnel. A lightning flash outlines a sinuous, ropelike object on the ground ahead. He freezes until he’s satisfied it isn’t alive. Just a stick.
His thirteen-year-old brain still carries the memory of being seven and running with Caesar through the rubber trees. (“Caesar” and “Jimmy” are the only dog names in Travancore, no matter the dog’s gender.) The little pye-dog spun around, crouching on his front paws, grinning and daring Philipose to catch up, his tail wagging so vigorously that his hind end was in danger of coming loose, before he took off again, delirious with joy. Suddenly, the little fellow shot up in the air, as if he’d stepped on a spring; Eden was no more. Philipose caught a glimpse of a hood and heard a rustle in the undergrowth. It was an ettadi moorkhan, or “eight steps serpent.” Eight was all you had once bitten, but only if you didn’t dawdle. Caesar managed four. “Dogs have names,” he says bitterly, feeling the pain of Caesar’s death just as if it happened yesterday, and continuing an earlier dialogue with the cat who’d wandered into the kitchen and eyed the karimeen his mother packed for his lunch. “A dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.”
His collar is damp, and his shirt sticks as he walks parallel to the swollen waterway. He feels a presence behind him; a wave of gooseflesh spreads up his arms. Don’t let Satan mount your will because he will ride you to perdition. He says aloud what his mother has taught him: “God is in charge!” He turns to see a sinister shape in the water, blocking out the sky. A hulking rice barge, slowing to a stop. It is mooring. According to Joppan, the debauched bargemen he oversees have secret mooring spots where women sell them companionship and country liquor, relieve them of their wages, and pilfer from the load. He’s envious of Joppan, who instead of the drudgery of school enjoys sunsets on Lake Vembanad and movies in Cochin and Quilon. Joppan has dreams of motorizing these barges and revolutionizing the transport of goods; he says no one has considered this because the canals are shallow and the barges ancient, but Joppan has detailed drawings on how an engine could be mounted.
The waterway broadens and forks around a small island, the water reaching the steps of the two new churches built on it. What had been one Pentecostal congregation split into two when tempers suddenly flared like flames on thatch. After fisticuffs the splinter group built their church on their share of the land. The churches are so close together that the Sunday sermon in one tries to drown out the other.
Now he hears the roar of the main river ahead into which this canal feeds, much louder than usual; he feels a rumble underfoot. He recalls Shamuel saying that flash floods have chewed up the river banks. It explains why the barge chose to tie down. Fat raindrops kick up bullet-craters in the red soil and beat a tattoo on his umbrella, while the wind tries to claw it away. He shelters under a cluster of palms. He will be late for school. He has two choices: he can stay dry and be caned for tardiness, or be punctual but wet to the marrow. Either way he will get his knuckles rapped by Saaji Saar, who is mathematics teacher and football coach at St. George’s Boys High School. Saar’s athleticism shows in the force and accuracy with which he flings chalk or smacks a head. As Philipose can testify, having borne the brunt of it, one doesn’t see it coming. “I wasn’t inattentive,” he says to Big Ammachi. “Saar mumbles! When he’s facing the blackboard, who can tell what he says?” Big Ammachi visited Saar and insisted that Philipose be seated in the front, because he struggles to hear from the back. His grades soared, even topping Kurup, who usually tops everything, but now he is an easy target for spitballs from the rear and Saar’s frontal assaults. He is getting known in school, but not for the best reasons.
There is a third choice. “Fill your stomach, then decide!” He unwraps his lunch packet. “I was led into temptation,” he says aloud to his mother. He meditates on the delicious blackened crust and the flavors of pepper, ginger, garlic, and red chili. His tongue probes for the karimeen’s fine bones that are nature’s way of saying, Slow down and savor.