Big Ammachi lights the lamp. Philipose hobbles out of his dark room, squinting like a civet cat. He’s down to one crutch. The broken right ankle has healed, but the shattered left heel remains painful. No one quite understood how badly he’d hurt himself leaping from the plavu after retrieving Ninan’s body, not till the next day when his ankles looked like Damo’s, even the same gray color, but twisted. The unbearable pain of losing Ninan was compounded by physical pain.
He slumps down on Baby Mol’s bench. Big Ammachi sits by him, willing him to ask about Elsie. Instead he absentmindedly roots around the tucked-in end of his mundu, like a monkey searching for lice, till he finds the tiny wooden box. She notes that his nails need trimming as he pries the lid open to reveal the wafer of opium. Every household has such a box, the old person’s panacea for backaches, insomnia, and arthritis. Big Ammachi used it for her husband’s headaches. She wishes she’d never given it to Philipose. Her son has become an opium eater.
He’s preoccupied, scraping with the bamboo toothpick to get a curl of opium, then rolling it between his fingers, an annoying back and forth to shape a shiny black pearl. When she was a child, that pearl had looked beautiful to her when her grandmother ate it. Once, her grandmother had let her lick her finger; the vile bitter taste made her retch. She’s tempted to slap it out of the hands of her once-handsome son, but it’s already in his mouth. He says, “Ammachi, can you bring me a little yogurt and honey?” She gets up before she says something terrible. Let him get his own yogurt.
A few weeks after Chandy’s funeral, she writes to Elsie again. Her letters thus far have gone unanswered, but she needs to convey to Elsie that her beloved Baby Mol’s breathing is worse than ever. Baby Mol’s real sickness is her wounded soul. She hardly eats, saying she’ll eat when Elsie comes back. Big Ammachi writes, “When people she loves leave, it’s a kind of death. I beg you to visit.” She leaves out so much in the letter. Lizzi has written again, but without a return address—she doesn’t want her whereabouts known apparently. Lizzi says that while pregnant, she had an accident in which the baby’s hand escaped from her belly. Miraculously, the baby, named Lenin, was born healthy. Nor does Big Ammachi mention Philipose disappearing one day, then returning with a new bicycle, having skinned his chin, his knees, and his elbows in learning to ride. The purchase was triggered by Joppan refusing to buy opium for him, saying he must stop. After Ninan’s death, Joppan had stayed with Philipose for weeks, sleeping in the same room. Now, because of the opium, they have fallen out. Big Ammachi suspects the bicycle’s only purpose is to allow her son to purchase his own opium from the government shop by the church. None of this does she mention in her letter to Elsie.
Baby Mol’s condition deteriorates further. In desperation Big Ammachi writes a last letter, a short one—it seems futile to keep writing.
Dearest Elsie,
I pray this gets to you. Baby Mol is dying. Call it starvation or heartbreak, they are really the same thing. As one mother to another, I beg you to visit. All Baby Mol says is “Where’s Elsie?” If you come, she’ll eat. Then she might live.
Your loving Ammachi
Philipose sits shaving on the verandah, the mirror propped on the ledge. The sun is out. The so-called monsoon petered out after it started, proving to be an impostor. In the mirror’s reflection Philipose sees a figure coming up the path. A beggar, he thinks. No, it’s a woman in a white sari, carrying not even an umbrella. She’s tall, pale, gaunt, and beautiful. His heart cavorts. A wave of gooseflesh covers his arms.
Is he hallucinating? If this is Elsie, why isn’t she in the Thetanatt car? From the fog of memory he recalls Shamuel mentioning a collapsed culvert, changing the road to gushing stream. Only foot traffic can cross by clambering over a log fifty yards up.
Mouth agape, his face soapy, Philipose stares at the wife he hasn’t seen for a year. At times he’d imagined she never existed, that their life together was a dream. Memories crash down on him now: the schoolgirl, the bride he brought home, their first night, the cursed tree . . . He sits paralyzed, like a stone sculpture. Not ten minutes before, Baby Mol, who hadn’t risen from her mat for days, appeared at his elbow, saying, “Visitors are coming!” If he’d paid attention he could have bathed, put on a singlet and a fresh mundu.
Elsie stands there like the goddess Durga, her gray-opal eyes on Philipose. He worries about his appearance: the flat spot at the bridge of his nose from one bicycle fall, the cauliflower ear from another. The ground unfairly beckons his left side. Her faint flowery scent reaches him, one so different from what he remembers.
“Elsie!” he says, razor in his hand. El-sie. Two syllables standing in for his joy, their shared sorrow, and the forgiveness he seeks even if he’s unable to forgive himself. Being bereft of speech now is a blessing—words have never served him with her.
“Philipose,” she says. She looks past him and her hollowed-out face lights up as Baby Mol waddles into her chechi’s arms, chortling. Elsie sets her down, shocked at seeing cheekbones that were never visible, or Baby Mol’s blouse hanging off the collarbones. Big Ammachi emerges hearing auspicious sounds and embraces Elsie, saying simply, “Molay!”
Philipose looks on with envy. The most important women in his life are one frieze of black tresses, white sari, gray hair, bright ribbons, and a turmeric-stained chatta. They disappear into the kitchen. In the mirror he sees the Ordinary Man’s gaping mouth ready to catch flies.
CHAPTER 52
As It Once Was
1950, Parambil
Like a vengeful God, the real monsoon arrives soon after Elsie; it punishes them for being taken in by the pretender. Torrential rain and typhoon-force winds bend the palm fronds into peacocks’ tails before snapping them. Wind rushing through the windows makes the eerie sound of someone blowing over the mouth of an amphora. The electric pole crashes down, silencing the radio. Shamuel ventures out and returns shocked: past the burden stone is a new lake with no sign of its far shore. The legendary floods of 1924 caused destruction all over Travancore, but never troubled Parambil. Now the swollen stream where Big Ammachi bathes threatens the huts of the craftsmen and the pulayar. The river spills its banks, washes away the jetty, and for the first time in Big Ammachi’s memory, it can be seen from the house, stalking the dwelling that her husband made certain was out of its reach. By the fifth week, their awe at nature’s violence gives way to dejection. The land begs for mercy. There’s no vocabulary for their deepening sense of isolation. The newspaper hasn’t graced the house since the monsoon began.
Big Ammachi worries about Elsie, who spends hours pacing the verandah, even at night, studying the sky, looking desperate like a mother who left her baby unattended across the river. There was a time Elsie could be so engrossed in her drawing that she wouldn’t know if the roof blew away. Elsie planned a short visit, but all the same, why this hurry to leave?