Baby Mol smiles shyly on seeing the audience gathering, her kith and kin, here to witness her monsoon dance. She feels the weight of responsibility, for if the rains are to continue, everything depends on her. This tradition began when Baby Mol was a child, and since she will always be a child, it will always continue. She stands in the muttam, the watchers packing the verandah, or, in the case of the pulayar, leaning on the verandah wall, just under the overhang.
She begins swaying, clapping her hands to beat out a rhythm and matching it with her shuffling feet. As she warms up, the miracle occurs: the inelegant, trundling steps become fluid, and soon all limitations—her curved spine, her short stature, her broad hands and wide feet—melt away. Twenty pairs of hands clap with her and cheer her on. She thrusts her arms skyward, beckoning the clouds, grunting from the effort, while her eyes dart from this side to that. It is Baby Mol’s own mohiniyattam, and she is the mohini—the enchantress—swaying her hips, telegraphing a story with her eyes, her facial expression, her hand signals, and the posture of her limbs. Her mohiniyattam is earthy, lower to the ground, unschooled, and authentic. Sweat mingles with raindrops in the seriousness of her dance. The message in her gyrations is one that each observer makes for themself, but its themes are hard work, suffering, reward, and gratitude. Lucky life, it says to Philipose as the rain pelts down. Lucky, lucky life! Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over . . . When she’s done, she has secured their covenant, the monsoon has pledged its loyalty, the family is safe, and all is well with the world.
CHAPTER 49
The View
1949, Parambil
Yet the day after the monsoon begins, Baby Mol is inexplicably restless and unhappy, not sitting on her bench but pacing, not relishing the downpour the way she usually does. They fear that she’s ill, that her lungs and overburdened heart are troubling her. She lies with Elsie, who massages her legs while Big Ammachi cradles her head. No one can imagine that Baby Mol is now forty-one years old, not a baby at all yet always a baby. Big Ammachi pleads, “Tell me what is wrong,” but Baby Mol only groans and weeps inconsolably, at times talking back sharply to whatever phantasm is whispering in her ear.
At night, husband and wife lie listening to the heavens empty on Parambil, Ninan asleep beside Elsie, and Philipose holding his wife close, both of them troubled by what ails Baby Mol.
The next morning, there’s a strange lull and the skies clear. The sun comes out. People venture out cautiously, uncertain how long this will last. Uplift Master hurries over to get Big Ammachi’s signature on a tax appeal form. Georgie and Ranjan decide this is the moment to talk to Philipose about a land lease with deferred payments. Shamuel and others are clustered behind the kitchen too, coming to get paid and to be given stored paddy, as is customary at the start of the monsoon. Joppan wanders up from his hut. Odat Kochamma takes the clothes out to hang on the line, pessimistic about the prospects of anything drying. No sooner is her task complete than a fine drizzle of tiny needles comes down. She grumbles at the skies, saying it should make up its mind.
A scream shatters the calm, a sound so terrible it arrests the drizzle. Philipose, at his desk, knows at once that it comes from the adjacent room, from Elsie’s lips, even though he’s never heard such a sound from her before, a full-throated shriek of terror that chills his blood. He gets to her first.
Elsie clutches the bars of their window, still screaming. Philipose thinks she’s been bitten by a snake but sees no sign of one. He follows her gaze through the window to the naked plavu. What he sees brings bile to his mouth.
Baby Ninan. Suspended upside down, his face white, bloodless, frozen into a surprised expression, his body crooked in a manner that defies the senses.
A pointed, amputated branch of the tree grows out of his chest, blood congealed around its exit in a ragged fringe.
Philipose, screaming, charges outside and up the tree, feeling his legs slip on the wet bark, abrading his shins on the rain-soaked trunk, scraping his hands raw as he claws—how did Ninan get up at all?—but at last getting a handhold on one sharp stump. Fueled by adrenaline and desperation, he finds one foothold and the next till he has reached his son. He tries with one hand to lift him free. Shamuel, who was by Philipose’s room when he heard the screams, clambers up behind him now, defying his age, willing himself up behind the thamb’ran. Joppan arrives in time to see his father reach Philipose. The old man’s body, the color of the bark, is pressed against Philipose. He can smell Shamuel’s hot breath scented with betel nut and beedi smoke as together—and it takes them both—they grunt and pull at Ninan, needing first to lift him clear of the spike. They heave up, and with a sickening sucking sound, the torso comes away from the pointed stump.
The body slips from their hands to Joppan and the many hands waiting below, and Ninan is laid on the ground, limp and unmoving, his spine at a crooked angle, rain now falling on his inert body and on all of them. Shamuel clambers down, and when he’s clear, Philipose, not bothering to climb down, just pushes himself off the trunk from that height, and lands hard, yelling from the lightning pain that shoots through both ankles as his heels smash the ground, but in the next instant bending over his son, shouting, his voice carrying over the fields and through the trees. “Ayo! Ayo! Ente ponnu monay!” My precious child! He screams, “Monay! Ninan! Talk to me!” refusing to accept what his eyes show him, deaf to the cries of Elsie and Big Ammachi or the others hovering over him, deaf to the wailing, the beating of their breasts, the retching sounds. He hears none of it, because Ninan’s midsection is the world caved in, a dark pit of horror, the center of a universe that has betrayed a child; betrayed the mother, father, and grandmother and all who loved him. Everything that belonged to the small body—breath and pulse and voice and thought—is gone and is dead, is beyond dead.
He gathers up his broken boy. When hands try to restrain him, Philipose fights them off, beats them away. He cradles his son in his arms, a lunatic intending to run into the gathering darkness of monsoon clouds. And if not to those healing clouds, where is he running? For a man on broken, crooked ankles seeking help for his firstborn, the nearest hospital is farther than the sun.
Shamuel and Joppan trot behind this crazed figure, Joppan’s hand around his childhood friend’s waist, around the hobbling creature that shouts, as if rising decibels might rouse what can never be roused again, “Monay, don’t leave us! Monay, ayo Ninanay! Wait! Stop! Listen to me! Monay, I’m sorry!”
The men of Parambil—uncles, nephews, cousins, laborers—alerted by the wails, follow in the blood trail, falling in behind father and deceased son. Less than a furlong down the road, Philipose is still staggering forward like a drunkard on wobbly ankles, his left foot unnaturally turned inward, sobbing, and the men weep too, grown men, surrounding him but not daring to stop him, a measured march alongside a father who thinks he is running when he’s barely shuffling, and finally just standing in place, swaying like an ancient.