When Shoshamma inherited the property, there was no debating what they should do. They had won the lottery. He resigned, they took leave of their friends, and they moved to Parambil. Village Uplift keeps him busy, but he misses the bustle of the Madras office, misses the brokers and agents—British and native—who came and went. He was a cog in the engine of global commerce, and he’d recount to a rapt Shoshamma the stories of the day. Of course, he never mentioned Blossom, the Anglo-Indian stenographer with the flowery frocks with tight bodices who had a special smile for him. Blossom unlocked a door in his imagination. Oh, the things his mind conjured up! When he was intimate with Shoshamma, he sometimes imagined Blossom saying naughty things in his ear, because with Shoshamma their intimacies took place in sepulchral silence. Now, at Parambil, even Blossom has faded. A fantasy far from its source is hard to sustain, just as winning the lottery doesn’t bring happiness forever.
“Geography is destiny,” his boss, J. J. Gilbert, loved to say. Uplift Master thinks it should be “Geography is personality.” Because the Madras Shoshamma who bathed, chewed a clove, put on a fresh sari and jasmine in her hair before he returned from office, gave way to the Parambil Shoshamma, who wore the shapeless chatta and mundu. Gone was the sight of her bare midriff peeking between sari and blouse, or the way those garments accentuated her breasts and buttocks. In Madras they were occasional churchgoers but now Shoshamma insisted they attend every Sunday and she instituted evening prayers. She was as loving and playful as ever, but she began meddling in affairs of business that she had always left to him. It was small things at first, like countermanding his orders to their pulayan. Then, not long ago, he returned from Trivandrum to find Shoshamma had sold their entire coconut harvest to the trader Coconut Kurian. Uplift Master was stunned, hurt, and angry, but held his tongue. He decided to punish her with silence. The very next day, an anti-hoarding edict passed, and coconut prices plummeted, catching Coconut Kurian and others flat-footed, while thanks to Shoshamma, they made off extremely well. That was luck and it didn’t excuse her actions. That night in bed, maintaining his silence, he reached for her out of habit. Many nights, indeed, most nights, and certainly on Saturday and Sunday, they were intimate. She had always taken up the customary position and he’d assumed that meant willingness, if not eagerness on her part. But that night when he tugged gently at her hip, she didn’t roll over. He tugged again. “Is that all that’s on your mind?” she said, in her playful, sleepy voice, her back to him. “After two children, surely we can be done with this.”
He sat up, stung by words that were not foreplay, but no-play! Did she mean she’d suffered his lovemaking all these years? Breaking his silence, he addressed her backside indignantly. “What? All these years I take the initiative to fulfill my conjugal duties as it says in Corinthians, and now my reward is to be characterized as a lascivious man?” She didn’t stir, which infuriated him. “If that’s how you feel then mark my words, Shoshamma, I will henceforth not initiate intimacy!” She turned slowly to study him, alarmed by this threat—or so he imagined. “Yes, I vow before Mar Gregorios that I will never initiate. From now on, Shoshamma, you must initiate.” She looked astonished, then she smiled sweetly and said, “Aah. Valare, valare thanks.” Many, many thanks. Her using the English word “thanks” only made her sarcasm more wounding. She turned back and went to sleep.
At once he knew he’d made a horrible mistake: Shoshamma had never initiated. With her new Christian propriety, she never would! He hardly slept, while she slept the sleep of the sinless. In the morning she brought him coffee and smiled. If she felt remorse, he saw no sign of it. His self-inflicted celibacy now extending over a year is like a preview of death. With time his feelings for her harden, but his desire is intact. In sleep he’s led down carnal paths. In his waking hours all his energy goes to Village Uplift.
Now, as the train carrying one part of him pulls away, Uplift Master feels himself unraveling, and his heart is so heavy. Can Village Uplift alone sustain his spirits? Even if the maharajah one day bestows on him a formal title, will it ease the pain? Is the best part of his life already over?
Outside the station, his eye is caught by a sign nailed to a palm tree by a canal. A crude arrow sits beneath the hand-drawn letters: ?????. Kall-uh. Toddy. He walks along the canal in the arrow’s direction, the water shimmering green, until he sees the shack slouching in tall reeds, with the same sign, like a pottu on its forehead. In the dark interior, he drinks alone, a first. A man fulfilled at home has no reason to be in a toddy shop. He takes a long pull from the bamboo gourd. There’s nothing new about toddy. But on this afternoon, to his astonishment, the cloudy white liquid turns into a magical elixir that restores his equilibrium, eases his distress. It’s as if a rock the size of an elephant has been sitting on his chest, ever since that regrettable night with Shoshamma. Now, in the gloomy shop, through the medium of toddy, the stone slides off. He realizes at that moment that he has fallen in love, and that not every love affair requires a second person.
CHAPTER 40
Labels That Take Away
1943, Madras
When Philipose opens his eyes, it is morning and they’re tearing noisily past busy railway crossings on the outskirts of Madras, passing paved roadways and low-slung houses. The sky and the horizon are visible in every direction with not a coconut palm in sight. The palette of Madras is a single shade: the soil is brown, the tar roads are coated dusty brown, and the whitewashed buildings have a brown tinge. There appear to be no streams or rivers at all. The locomotive thunders through an urban tunnel, its whistle amplified, and then they crawl into the hangar-like space of Central Station, a city unto itself. Red-turbaned porters squat on the edge of the platform, their noses inches from the passing carriages, motionless. At the sound of a whistle, they leap like monkeys into the compartments, ignoring the passengers, attacking the luggage, and baring fangs at each other.
His porter’s white mustache pushes out like the cowcatcher of a locomotive as he weaves through the crowds on the platform with Philipose’s trunk and bedroll on his head. Noise batters Philipose’s eardrums: the shriek of metal-wheeled trolleys whose axles cry for oil; whistle blasts; vendors yelling; children squalling; brazen oversized crows squawking over remnants of rice on discarded banana leaves; the porters’ incessant cries of “Vazhi, vazhi!”—Give way, give way!—all of these drowned out by a thunderous voice from overhead speakers announcing an arrival on Platform something-or-other. Philipose’s head reels from the sensory assault.
The platforms converge on a cement-floored lobby bigger than three football fields and shaded by a five-story-high metal roof on steel girders. There are more soldiers here than there were at the platform in Cochin. The seething humanity swarms like ants on a corpse, moving in streams and eddies that curl around stationary islands of travelers camped atop their luggage. One such island is a family with shaved heads, sitting like eggs cosseted in saffron cloth—pilgrims from Tirupati, or Rameswaram. His porter detours around another static cluster of colorful gypsies, one of whom, a woman in a fiery-red sari, studies Philipose with her dark, kohl-lined eyes. She sits atop a crate, knees up, legs apart, as though seated on plush cushions, a slovenly maharani. He cannot look away. She deliberately hikes her red sari and flicks her tongue out at him, the beefy wet organ sliding over very white teeth, then she laughs at his shocked expression. This is just the station, country boy. Wait till you see what’s outside. In her gaze, his ambition to be a literary man feels like a joke. What his nose, eyes, ears, and body are experiencing is not something words can capture. If he could turn back, get on a returning train at this instant, he would.