When he awakes past midnight, they’re still entwined at the legs, but her nightgown and his mundu have shifted so that the bare skin of her thigh is against his. He’s suddenly as alert as if he’d been splashed with water. The places where his skin touches hers burn. He presses gently against her and, astonishingly, she responds. Her eyes open. He’s uncertain as to how, precisely, to proceed. His head drifts closer. She presses against this new hardness of his that wasn’t there in the tender embrace before sleep.
Their lips meet, an awkward brushing—exciting, but dry. Not what he had imagined. They try again, a more determined exploration, and now their tongues touch, an electric sensation, and an intimacy so profound that his body tingles. He fumbles with her gown, and suddenly her breasts are exposed. Nothing, but nothing in his life will surpass that first moment of seeing them, of touching them, of feeling her respond. His hand moves diffidently down, while the back of her hand and then her fingers gingerly touch that part of him that cannot be ignored. Their shared uncertainty and clumsiness are as erotic as all that preceded it. He props himself up and over her. He is like a blind man who has stumbled into a corner and probes with his cane, but she guides him with one hand, the other on his chest as a brake. Ever so slowly, she eases him in. She winces, but still holds him. Only when he feels her relax does he move very gently. Lord, he thinks, once you discover this, how is it possible to do anything else? He has melted into the body of his new bride, their breath, their sap and sinew all one. No self-experimentation and nothing in Fanny Hill or Tom Jones prepared him for the thrill and the tenderness of what has just happened.
They succumb to a mysterious anesthetic veil that settles over them, thick with their mingled scents. He wakes, remembering what just transpired, and the memory leaves him fully aroused once more, achingly so, wanting it all over again. He wills her to open her eyes, and out of the fog of sleep soon she does, momentarily trying to figure out where she is. She looks suddenly vulnerable, waking up in this new house. Recognizing her state, he gently gathers her in his arms and holds her. He wonders if she is in pain. The way she snuggles against him makes him think that he did the right thing to hold her. After a long while, she pulls her head back, looks at him, and kisses him, her breath tasting of him and of sleep. She whispers something, but he can’t quite make out her lips. “Elsie, I struggle hearing the whispered voice. I’m sorry.” She brings her lips close to his ear. “I said, ‘I don’t think if I had married anyone else, I would feel as safe as I do with you.’ That’s what I said.” She nestles back against him, and they fall asleep once more.
They wake in unison. Light streams in through the cruciate vents and windows. The lazy rooster crows, The-Sun-Has-Risen-Before-Me-Ayo-ayo-adoo. A distant clang of a bucket against the side of a well, the creak and whirr of rope and pulley. The household rousing itself.
Sweat glistens in the hollow behind her collarbone. Their mingled scent is so rich, so carnal. He wants to tell her how stunning last night’s congress was, how . . . But words might only diminish it. Instead, he kisses her eyelids, her brow, and every inch of her face. “I want you to be happy here, Elsie,” he whispers. “Any wish that I can fulfill, just say . . . Anything.”
The words sound grand even to him. They ennoble him. Benevolent, besotted sovereign, he gazes lovingly at his queen, her straight nose, the eyes so long and narrow, echoing the shape of her face. In the many months after their train ride, he remembered her eyes as close-set, but that was because of the way they sloped down to her nose, his Nefertiti. And memory never sufficiently recorded the delicate Cupid’s bow of her upper lip. He’s drunk, so drunk on his beautiful bride, his being bursting with generosity, like Emperor Shah Jahan offering to build a palace for his beloved.
“Anything?” she says dreamily, her arms stretched out beside her like wings, her lips barely moving, her eyes half open. “Like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? Are you sure?”
“Yes, anything,” he says.
She raises up on one hand, turning to him, her breasts on his chest, a sight so astonishing in daylight that if she asked him to cut off his head in order to keep feasting on the sight, he’d agree. She’s amused and pleased by his attention, not self-conscious, remaining just as she is so he may keep gazing. The skin is unnaturally smooth, creamy, and paler than the rest of her before abruptly transitioning to the darker areola. Their passion for each other’s bodies, so recently discovered, overtakes shyness. The schoolgirl in the car, the Young Miss who took snuff with him on a train, is now his bride, and her eyes say, Go ahead, look, kiss, touch . . .
“Anything,” he says, his words slurring with love and sated lust. “And I don’t mean building a studio. That, we’ll do. I’ve drawn a plan—extend that south verandah, put a roof over it. It’ll have good light, but it’s for you to decide. No, I mean anything else. Recapture the Holy Land? Slay the dragon?” He strokes her face.
She studies him, smiling, hesitating. Then she looks to the window—no hesitation there. He follows her gaze, trying to see his familiar world through her eyes.
“I love morning light. That plavu,” she says, pointing to the tree where the closest jackfruit, the size of a child’s head, stares back at them. “It keeps this room dark. You can cut it down. That’s my wish.”
Cut down the plavu? The tree that has watched over him in his sleep ever since he was a boy?
She says, “Beyond it there must be a lovely view.”
CHAPTER 47
Fear the Tree
1945, Parambil
It’ll be gone by evening, darling! That’s what he should say. Instead, he hesitates long enough for the rooster to crow again. “That tree?” he says. The false note in his voice sickens him.
Her gaze retreats. Her smile crumples like that of a child offered sweets only to have them snatched away. In a planet divided into those who keep their word and those who just speak words, she’s given her body to one of the latter.
“It’s all right, Philipose—”
“No, no, please, dear Elsie, let me explain. I’ll cut it down. I will. I promise, yes. But will you give me some time?”
“Of course,” she says. But already he feels the fissure, the seam in their union. If only he could step back. Or if only she’d made another wish.
“Thank you, dear Elsie. Here’s the thing . . .”
His story “The Plavu Man” struck a peculiar chord with some readers. A few people make pilgrimages to see this plavu, believing that his story is real and that this is the very tree described, and nothing Philipose says will change their minds. Others write to him, care of the newspaper, requesting their letters be placed in the tree, tucked into its hollow—their words are addressed to the departed soul they are trying to track down. All this prompted his editor to commission a photo of Philipose in front of the tree.
“The photographer comes soon. Meanwhile, I will also get Shamuel’s blessing. You see, he’s often told me the story of his father and my father planting this tree when they cleared the land. This was the first. When I was a boy, Shamuel showed me how. We dug a hole, put one giant chakka inside, intact. From the hundred seeds inside that crocodile skin, twenty sprouts pushed up. Any one of them could have been its own tree. But we weaved them all together, forced them to be one mighty plavu.” He has said too much, he knows.
From the kitchen, he hears pots rattling. A raucous crow calls to its mate, Look at our idiot friend, opening his mouth when it should have stayed shut.
“Don’t worry. Don’t ask Shamuel. You don’t need to—”
“Elsie, no! Pretend it’s gone. Consider your wish fulfilled. Ask me something that I can do right now, ask me—”
“It’s all right,” she says more gently than he deserves, hunching her shoulders into her nightgown, corralling her breasts. “I don’t need anything else.” She rises, tall and proud, fastening the buttons from top down until the dark triangle of her womanhood and the gleam of her thighs are just a memory.
She pauses at the doorway. Filtered by the plavu leaves, the light through the window illuminates those gray-blue irises that glint like graphite.