The days that follow feel awkward. But silence still feels better than confessing. Besides, how does one rationally explain irrational fears? He tries on a new persona each time he’s around her, the way a man might try on a new shirt or grow a mustache, hoping the world (and his wife) will perceive him differently. Nothing works, though. It’s on the tip of his tongue every moment they are together to say, “Forgive me, I’ve been an idiot.” But a belligerent voice inside him warns against it, or else he’ll be making concessions for the rest of his married life. How long can this feud go on?
Not much longer, as it turns out, because Baby Mol, sitting on her bench, announces that a car is coming. A half hour later, the estate car and driver pull up. Elsie must have written home. She hands a stack of canvases to the driver and returns to their room for more. Philipose follows, furious, disbelieving, conflicted, the blood pounding in his ears. She’s putting a hairpin in her locks while gazing out of the window at the plavu—
He seizes on it. “Look here,” he says. “This is all because of that damn tree, isn’t it? I’ll take care of it, I told you. But in case you forgot, I forbade you to leave.” She turns calmly to regard him, but she doesn’t seem surprised or affected by his words. He waits. She’s silent, gathering her brushes and combs. Her reaction deflates him. He stands there, feeling sillier by the second.
“Stay in this room then until you change your mind,” he says, in too loud a voice, and storms out, slamming the lower half of the split door, but since the bolt is on the inside, he must reach over and slide it into place. He’s only looking more stupid: the jailer leaving the keys on the inside. He stands there, breathing heavily, and turns around to find his mother in his face. She came running at the sound of slamming doors and his raised voice. He tries to step around her, but Big Ammachi won’t budge till he explains. He mumbles disjointedly about the tree . . .
“What nonsense! Cut the stupid tree down. It’s an eyesore,” she says. She shoves him aside, reaching over and opening the door. Before she steps inside, she turns to him, lowering her voice. “And don’t you see she’s pregnant? How silly of you not to go with her!”
He watches helplessly as his wife is driven away.
Over the next week he has time to get accustomed to the shock of Elsie being pregnant, of her absence, of his idiocy. Baby Mol refuses to talk to him. Big Ammachi’s anger fades as she sees him moping around the house. “It’s good for her to see her family. I wish I’d had that chance as a young bride. If Elsie’s mother were alive, Elsie would have gone there to deliver anyway. As much as you like home, you need to get out more, for her sake.”
He wants to go to his wife, but he has no idea whether she’s in the Thetanatt home or up in the bungalow in the estate—a place he has never been. He writes long penitent letters to both places and waits. A fortnight later, Elsie writes him a short, formal note, making no reference to his letters. She lets him know that she’s in the estate bungalow in the hills and plans to stay there another week before returning with her father to the Thetanatt house in the plains. Nothing else.
A week and a day later, he travels to the Thetanatt house for the first time since the engagement. Mercifully, the servant says Chandy and his son are away. He sits in the airy living room on a small sofa, facing that too-long white settee that has more legs than a centipede. One of the framed photos high on the wall is a memento mori: the family posed around an open coffin. A six-or seven-year-old Elsie, eyes glazed, stands next to her brother—how did he miss this? It compounds his remorse.
When Elsie emerges, her beauty, the sight of her takes his breath away. She sits across from him on the sofa. If he’s been sleepless and fraught during this brief separation, she looks rested, as though being apart has suited her. Pregnancy brings a ripeness to her face, and a deep tan to her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. She’s wearing the same coral-and-blue sari she wore at her engagement—is that a good sign? She looks at him without anger, without anything, the way she would look at a gecko on the wall, wondering what it will do next.
“Elsie, I’m sorry.” She says nothing. He’s mortified to recall sitting on the verandah with her at their engagement and promising he understood and would support her desire to be an artist. And he did! He has. He does. Yet here he is.
He tries again. “And we’re going to have a baby! If I’d only known!” She doesn’t reply. He sighs. “Elsie, I was wrong to behave as I did. Like a bullock kicking over the loaded cart.” His words seem to sadden her, and perhaps to soften her expression. “Elsie, are you feeling well?”
She shrugs and presses her lips together. He wants to rush over and hold her.
She glances down at her waist. Nothing shows. “My stomach twists . . . I can’t stand the smell of paint. I’m doing charcoals. But it did me good to be with my father in the bungalow. To see old friends.”
“Elsie, you should see the studio. The ashari finished the beautiful teak cabinets for your supplies. I put them all away. It looks so nice.”
He doesn’t say that in the process he’d understood just how prolific she’s been. It made him feel like a pretender. His few inches of musings are published in a regional newspaper in a regional language, even if it has a huge circulation. “Elsie, please understand, after Madras . . . things that take me out of my routine make me feel unsettled, anxious, especially meeting a lot of new people, worrying if I’ll hear what they say. When you told me about your father’s invitation, at that moment, my heart was racing, I felt faint. But the worst thing is I was so ashamed, too ashamed to tell you the truth, so—”
“It’s all right, Philipose,” she says. She looks at him with pity and perhaps even affection. He’s exposed himself before her. His turmoil, his confusion are the most real things about him. He’d imagined that once he explained, she might come home to Parambil. But now he sees that if he loves her, he must accept anything she decides to do. Still, if only she’d let him sit by her, hold her hand.
The maid brings two glasses of lime juice on a tray that she sets before Elsie. The woman steals a curious glance at Philipose. Elsie brings the two glasses over and sits by him. He sighs, his relief so evident that it must move her. Whenever they sat this close there was a magnetic pull that made them touch, they couldn’t help it. Perhaps she feels it because she leans against him and smiles. He reaches for her hand, and their fingers intertwine. A groan escapes him as the agonies of the last month ease.
“Elsie, forgive me,” he says. “I love you so much. What am I to do?”
She looks at him with affection, but still wary, still with some distance. “Philipose . . . You can love me just a little less.”
CHAPTER 48
Rain Gods
1946–1949, Parambil
Baby Ninan arrives in the year of our Lord 1946, like a summer squall out of a cloudless sky, neither rustle of leaves nor ripple of clothes on the line to offer a warning.
That day, Big Ammachi and Odat Kochamma are in the kitchen, the palm spathe and dried coconut husks crackling on the red embers, and smoke seeping out from under the thatch roof as though emerging from hairy nostrils. “Yeshu maha magenay nennaku,” For you, Lord Jesus, son of God, Odat Kochamma sings as she stirs the pot. Philipose is gone to the post office.
“AMMACHI!”
The peace of that blessed morning is shattered. The terror in Elsie’s voice that is coming from the main house stops everything. They find her in the doorway to her room, as though trying to prop it up, her hands white as she clutches the frame. Her hair is uncorralled and spilling down to frame a face that is deathly pale. The light illuminating the house is so beautiful that day, so substantial, that one could lean into it, something Big Ammachi will forever remember.