Philipose sees Shamuel return with a pulayar crew, including a rare sighting of Joppan. Philipose often sees Joppan’s wife, Ammini, working alongside Sara, but little of Joppan. He heard that Joppan has remodeled his dwelling, bringing in timber to replace the thatch walls and putting in a cement floor that extends out to make a porch. The barge business is thriving again. Ammini works alongside her mother-in-law, weaving thatch panels, and she has taken over the muttam-sweeping and gets paid for it.
“First, remove the fruits. Each of you can have one,” Shamuel says to the crew. He squats to watch. Sara appears and hunkers beside him. The men lower the heavy, prickly orbs down. “Good thing these fruits grow close to the trunk,” Shamuel says to his wife after a while. “They’re like boulders! Falling coconuts are dangerous enough, but a falling chakka will kill you. Look at my toe if you think I’m joking! You know, don’t you?”
Sara acts as if she doesn’t hear him and leaves without a word. Shamuel was urinating behind a jackfruit tree, needing privacy as there were women around. He’d fished out his penis—his “Little-Thoma”—and looked down. At Shamuel’s age, to get flow going, he had to cough, spit, imagine a waterfall, lean a hand on something, or look up. His tale always finishes with “If I’d been looking down at my Little-Thoma, that would have been the end. If I hadn’t looked up, I wouldn’t be talking to you now!” He had time to pull his head back before the jackfruit landed on his toe.
As Sara walks away, she thinks, Why do men look down? Isn’t it always there? It won’t walk off. Just point and shoot! She rejoins Ammini to finish a thatch panel. She says to her daughter-in-law, “That man is my life. But if he repeated his chakka-landing-on-foot story today, I’d have finished off what the chakka left undone.”
Once the fruits are down, Shamuel directs the men to amputate every branch near its origins, “just beyond the shoulders.” They look puzzled. His nephew, Yohannan, asks, “Why not cut the whole tree down?”
“Eda Vayinokki!” Shamuel says. Busybody! “Who are you to ask? ‘Why’ is because the thamb’ran asked. Isn’t that enough?!”
What’s wrong with Yohannan? Shamuel thinks, annoyed. Did he wake up and forget what it means to be one of us? The truth is he himself doesn’t understand why the tree should be cut this way. So what? How many things has he done because the thamb’ran said so? What else matters?
The men chop off each branch with their sharp vakkathis by cutting a wedge on two sides until it weakens and crashes down, leaving behind a pointed spear, a sharp stump. Sap pours out at these cuts, and the men quickly collect it in gourds. Children use the sap as birdlime, a cruel practice as far as Shamuel is concerned. But it makes an excellent glue that he’ll use to caulk his old canoe. Who would think one could caulk a canoe this late in June? Flecks of white sap dot the men’s skin and stick to their vakkathis. It’ll take oil and scraping with coconut husk to get it off the blades and handles of these machetes.
“That’s good wood,” Shamuel calls out. “Just keep one branch for me to make an oar. It isn’t easy wood, but if you do it right it has a beautiful shine. Take what you want to make whatever you like. Sell it to the ashari if you’re too lazy, what do I care?”
Soon the air is thick with the sick, cloying smell of ripe jackfruit. Once the others are gone, Shamuel and Joppan stare at what’s left: a thick, tall trunk with dagger-like arms and fingers. A malevolent goddess. Joppan says bitterly, “This is stupid. People who don’t know what to do with the land shouldn’t be allowed to keep it.” He walks off before his astonished father can respond.
From the bedroom, Philipose watches the men as they finish up. Perhaps Elsie will consider what’s left to be a sculpture, a candelabra with a dozen pointy upturned limbs. But he’s deceiving himself and knows it. What’s left is an unsightly scarecrow clawing at the sky. This compromise was meant to give her a well-lit room while preserving his talisman, but the result is ugly and embarrassing, like an old man’s nakedness. They should just fell this tree. Shamuel is there alone and Philipose is about to call out, “O’Shamuel’O! Have them just chop the whole thing down,” when he spots Joppan next to his father. Pride stops the words from leaving his mouth. It will only make him look sillier.
The bedroom is brighter, the light revealing a cobweb in a corner. Elsie was right: the tree obstructed the view. And what’s this he sees? He leans to get a better look. A change in the sky? No clouds, but the blue fabric has a different texture. Also a new scent in the air. Could it be?
Philipose heads outside. Caesar barks. A gust blows his mundu back between his legs. A flock of birds wheels around, confused. If he were on the beach at Kanyakumari, he might have seen the great southwest monsoon rolling in the previous day retracing a path that brought the ancient Romans, Egyptians, the Syrians to these shores.
He averts his eyes as he skirts the amputated plavu. He crosses the pasture, until he comes to the high bund on the edge of the paddy fields that extends into the distance, offering an unobstructed view of sky and a palm-fringed horizon. Others join him from the nearby huts, their faces taut with anticipation. They’ve forgotten that the monsoon will confine them for weeks, drown these parched paddy fields, leak through thatch, and deplete their grain stores; all they know is that their bodies, like the parched soil, crave rainfall; their flaking skin thirsts for it. Just as the fields will lie fallow, so too the body must rest to emerge renewed, oiled, and supple once again.
High in the sky a raptor is motionless on outstretched wings, riding the steady draft. The sky in the distance is reddish, and darker. A flash of light sends a ripple of excitement through the observers. They relish these minutes before the deluge, forgetting they will soon be wistful for clothes to dry properly and not have that mildewed, musty, last-century scent; they’ll curse doors and drawers that are stuck like breech babies. For now such memories are buried. The wind blusters erratically and Philipose fights for balance. A disoriented bird tries to fly into the wind, but the gust lifts a wingtip and sends it cartwheeling.
Now Shamuel is beside him, his skin flecked with white sap, grinning at the sky. At last, the leading edge of a dark mountain of cloud approaches, a black god—oh, fickle believers, why did you doubt its coming? It seems miles away, but also already on them, because it’s raining, blessed rain, sideways rain, rain from below, new rain, not the kind you can run away from, and not the kind you ward off with an umbrella. Philipose holds his face up, even as Shamuel watches him, smiling, murmuring, “Eyes open!”
Yes, old man, yes, eyes open to this precious land and its people, to the covenant of water, water that washes away the sins of the world, water that will gather in streams, ponds, and rivers, rivers that float the seas, water that I will never enter.
He hurries back to the house, Shamuel on his heels, because there’s an even more important ritual that awaits them. From the other houses they come too. They’re just in time.
Baby Mol, after a last glance in the mirror, waddles to the front verandah, a short child, her shoulders back despite a spine that is getting more hunched each year, her trunk swaying from side to side like a counterweight to her legs. Once they smelled rain, Big Ammachi hurriedly braided jasmine and fresh ribbons into Baby Mol’s hair and hustled her into her special dress: the shimmering blue skirt with the gold border, and on top a silky half-sari that drapes over her gold blouse and is pinned to its shoulder. Elsie painted a big red pottu in the center of Baby Mol’s forehead and applied kajal eyeliner that makes her all grown up.