He doesn’t register that she’s not responding to his attempted humor. The despair he saw the other night is cast permanently over her features, and it wounds him. If it heals him to hold her hand, surely it heals her too? The mundu’s knot at her chest is coming loose. He can’t make himself look away. He’s embarrassed by the surge of blood in his pelvis. No, that wasn’t my purpose at all when I asked you to sit, I swear by the monsoon god. But desire has its own vocabulary, more cogent than words his tongue might shape; despite him, it comes to the forefront.
Feeling a flood of tenderness, he embraces her. She doesn’t stop him. The thorthu slips from her hair, and when she reaches up to catch it, the knotted mundu comes fully undone. I didn’t make that happen. It’s the universe, or fate, or the god of mundus and thorthus, the god of misunderstanding, the god I don’t believe in. She clutches at the mundu, but his hand gently stays hers. He kisses her cheek, then her eyelids. She trembles, her face so sorrowful that it pierces him. He wants only to console her, but he’s also overcome with a familiar awe, the old wonderment that this exquisite woman is his wife. Lord of disappointments, lord of sorrows, tell me, why bless me only to take away? He feels her body enlarging before him, and his too—is this the doing of his black pearl? Her lips are fuller, the hollow at her throat that he so loves is wider, the dark areolae larger—all her most sensual features exaggerated and growing under his gaze.
How much pleasure their bodies used to give each other! No matter what else was happening, that never failed them. This could be the balm they need to make the unbearable bearable. After their loss, they never gave themselves the chance to weep on each other’s shoulders. They’d turned viciously on each other instead. He sees it all, sees what they should have done. He runs his fingers through her wet hair, hair so thick it always felt like a living thing separate from her. He gently draws her down to lie on the bed. Not forcing her. He sees the door is wide open, so he rises slowly, painfully, and limps over to bolt it. Her head is turned from him, her thoughts far away, as though she has forgotten his presence, but as he approaches, she looks at him, taking in his scabbed, scarred body, an artist’s gaze, but not free of curiosity and concern.
He climbs onto the bed. Her pupils are the opposite of his: large and bottomless. Her feet against his feel callused and rough, not the creamy, delicate feet of memory. She’s been going barefoot, a sure sign of a husband’s neglect. He kisses the hand that shields her breasts, and his lips encounter a hard ridge on the side of her index finger. He can imagine her working her fingers to the bone in her pain, plying her brushes day and night to reshape a world that has gone crooked. Her complexion is pale and patchy. He feels more remorse at further evidence of his neglect. “Oh, Elsie, Elsie,” he says, his heart breaking. “This is mine to make right, to make whole.” She doesn’t seem to understand, but it doesn’t matter, as long as he does. They are perfectly matched, he thinks, both of them weathered by grief and time. And what is time but cumulative loss?
His lips are on hers, but hesitantly. He doesn’t want to force himself on her. He will stop if it distresses her. But weren’t kisses what always resurrected them? A kiss can never say the wrong things. He wants to laugh, recalling their clumsy first kisses, pressing lips together as though sealing flaps of an envelope. They became experts. But she has forgotten. It’s for me to remind her. My duty to resurrect those lips and open our hearts. He does so tenderly, and he imagines she responds. Yes, he tells himself, there was movement in her lips—not passion, but that will take time.
He cups her breasts, circles the nipples with his fingers. He can hardly contain himself. Her eyes are closed, tears leaking from the corners, and he understands, because how can this not remind them of Ninan? She doesn’t resist, nor does she reach for him as in the days of old. It’s all right, my love. It’s all right. I’ll do all the work. Isn’t this what we need? The balm of Gilead, the cure for what ails us.
It used to be that when their two bodies were in motion, they became like the ecstatic temple carvings of Khajuraho, pivoting this way and that, sheets falling to the floor. But there’s time for all that, he thinks as he takes the upper berth. This is not about his need, only his desire to convey his love, his caring. Slowly, gently he probes, explores, touches, and when he feels her readiness, he enters. Now they are one body. He moves for them both. And at once, despite his best intentions, he experiences the rise and the surge, the selfish need, the born-again feeling, and hears her name rise in his throat, speaks it so urgently that for the first time she opens her eyes, and out of the black holes of her pupils a nameless other looks back—but he is too far gone, and he collapses into her, and inside her, the only woman he’s ever been with and will ever be with. What counter to death is there than this? This is forgiveness, this is the end of solitary mourning. Joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy are the weeds and flowers of their Eden, and it will outlast the mortal blooms of this world.
After a time, he does not know how long, their still and private orchard quakes, and she moves from under him. His eyelids are as heavy as rowboats as she sits up and reaches for her mundu. He’s floating off, sated, his heart at ease, the barrier between them dissolved. He experiences déjà vu seeing her on the edge of the bed, her back to him, her arms raised as she corrals her hair, twisting it around her palm and then into a knot, her elbows forming the points of a triangle that frame her head, the curve of her beaded spine echoing the inward curve of her waist, the outward curve of her buttocks. She turns to him, doesn’t meet his gaze but puts a hand on his chest, her eyes closed, head bowed, as though praying over him, staying that way for a long moment. She stands and he knows that next she will delicately wipe the damp mundu between her legs . . .
Except she doesn’t. She fastens the mundu and picks up the folded clothes she’d set down. At the mirror, she pauses to see that she’s covered. Her reflected eyes meet his, and he smiles drowsily, this too a reenactment of their old ritual. But a stranger stares back at him, a soul already departed from this world but granted a backward glance at her former life. She pads out without a word.
CHAPTER 53
Stone Woman
1951, Parambil
Without the nightly disembodied radio voices, without a newspaper, without even such news as the fishmonger carries, they feel like the last humans left on earth. A terrified Decency Kochamma wades from household to household, shouting for the inhabitants to repent if the village is to survive. A bare-chested Philipose stops her from crossing the threshold of his house. He informs her that the families all agree that if Decency Kochamma alone were to sacrifice herself to the river, the magnitude of her sins are such that God would be appeased.