It’s hard to pick one’s way out of Manhattan with two little children, oddments of baggage and toys. But the roads glisten in the quick rain and out the cab window, the hurtle of life on 116th Street and Lenox Avenue, the shops where they sell hair from Tirupati in vast quantities, rough, black human hair for wigs, plastic flowers, silk bouquets, all washed in wind and rain, offer a foretaste, a glimpse, of the pleasures of sheer motion, to the migrant poised in the car, children clutching her, the metal body on wheels moving swiftly. And she is filled with hope that two days away, another street, other windows, other rain-drenched roofs will welcome her.
The old exilic notions are gone. In the blur of returning, in the back and forth of this crisscross life, it is the multiple anchorages that count, the holding game. Then, thirty-six hours after leaving Kennedy Airport, the small Indian Airlines plane circles over the seashore. From the plane window she sees the Arabian Sea foaming at the edges, the sharp green of the coconut palms, water glinting in the ponds, the red soil cut and shaped into spaces for a hundred thousand habitations. In the long circling fall of the plane, controlled by wingspan and engine power, she holds tight to her child’s hand and breathes again, slowly, ever so slowly, as if beginning again, all over again. Then come the hot embraces, the four-hour car ride from the Trivandrum airport, past rubber plantations and paddy fields, past the signs of hammer and sickle raised in the clear air, and hundreds of red banners flying. At the stone gates to the house she almost stops breathing in excitement, and then, when the car stops, she helps the younger child out the door then walks ever so slowly to her father’s bedroom. He lies there on the bed, half raising himself, waiting for her. Her mother stands behind, worn out with the travel in the car, watching them both. The little girl-child is worn out now, whimpering a little. Two sisters come out to embrace the children. They leave the small child with her mother, but lead the boy away, into the cool back bedroom, the veranda, the silent courtyards of childhood.
As I embraced my mother on arrival, I noticed the gathering gray in her hair, the lines on her forehead etched more firmly. Age, the distress at appa’s illness, had done this to her. But all her daughters were in the house now, finally, and her two grandchildren too, and that gave her pleasure.
Anna, my middle sister who had returned to India at the age of thirteen, who had studied in Pune and Delhi and Paris, and now taught French, was at home. And with Anna had come her manuscripts of poetry, her canvases and oils. Elsa, my little sister, ten years younger, only eight when she had returned to India, was here too. She had also studied in Pune and Delhi and now was doing research in Indian history at Madras University, writing a master’s thesis, examining the documents of the Nationalist movement and the special involvement of Kerala Christians. Her focus on family history was a great help to me. She was looking at what lay behind us, at what had made us the family we were. For the first time in a decade, the three sisters had all gathered in the Tiruvella house. We were all aware of the fragility of our father’s life.
I wanted amma to speak to me about the past, and so often of an evening I would try to draw her towards the cool stone parapet that ran along the outer veranda. We could sit there, I thought, and breathe in the fragrance of the incense flowers, hear the birds cry out in the mango trees, and out of the distant gate catch glimpses of the dark buses that drove past on what was now the busy Kottayam–Mallapally road. Perhaps then she would talk to me, of her life, of our lives together. But it was so hard to get amma to stop moving. Her days were filled with a woman’s work, keeping a household running. Sometimes I walked with her through the house as she measured out the rice for lunch, or checked to see whether the linen had been ironed, the mangoes well cut, the fishman paid off, the buttermilk cooled as it should in the icebox, the grandchildren well pleased, with lumps of jaggery or cupcakes in their fists. Once I held onto the edge of her sari as I had done so often as a child: “Come, please come with me,” I coaxed. “Please, otherwise the guests will come or the children will call out and it’ll be impossible.”
She had learnt so well the constant necessity of turning away from oneself towards others, having just a few minutes to rub together to kindle a small fire for the mind to warm itself by, that she barely listened. Still, one afternoon, after a week of my efforts—something in my tone may have caught her attention, or perhaps it was just that she had half an hour or forty minutes at her disposal, a cool square of time that she could fold or open up as she pleased—amma was persuaded to sit with me on the the stone parapet and stare out at the incense tree. She laughed a little, adjusting her palm against a glass of cool buttermilk she had brought with her from the kitchen.
“So what is all this, mol? What can I tell you?”
I instantly regretted my high-pitched flurry a day earlier, just as lunch was being served. Voice pitched too high, as if I had ridden the subway too long, I had burst out against the decorum of marriage my mother had brought me up with. Still, it gnawed at me. I had burst out with something like, “Really amma, admit it now, if you’re a woman, in order to exist, you have to marry. You know that yourself. So how did you feel when your own marriage was arranged?”
Clearly my words lacked grace. There was no way for my mother even to conceive of being without marriage. She was gentle, though when she turned to me and reworded her earlier thoughts, which she had voiced and which I had tried to brush off: “Look at you now, a married woman with two children. How can you speak like this?”
“But, amma, think of the cruelty that occurs when women don’t marry.”
Inching my fingers towards her on the parapet, feeling the smooth stone under my fingertips and palms, I spoke of those close to us and added, “I think cousin Sugatha is the only person I know who was really made happy by an arranged marriage. At least she seemed happy then with her gold slippers and her Captain of the President’s Guard and the band at her wedding, and elephants and crystal gifts and the innumerable children sprinkling rosewater outside the church while the children of the very poor stood outside.”
“Meenamol, what has happened to you? I thought it was all going well for you in America with David?”
“I suppose it is, in a way, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking, does it? Or thinking of how all those dreams of a man, just the right man with just the right blood and the right background and property, can hurt and tear a woman’s skin. Amma, I never told you this, but those dreams of an arranged marriage almost destroyed me. I wanted David to carry me into that land, a house, an old family, property. ‘No one in my family has owned property,’ he said to me. ‘We are Jews after the Holocaust.’ Amma, can you imagine that?”
I laughed a little, then stopped, seeing her worn hand tremble on the glass of buttermilk.
“Let’s talk a little while the children are playing,” I said to her. “Can we?”
She started to speak, halting now and then, as if unsure of her words. I wonder if it was in her mind how her own mother had refused countless offers of arranged marriages and waited till she had met Ilya. Grandmother Kunju had forged ahead in her own life, received an master’s degree from Presidency College, Madras, worked as the National Secretary for the YWCA, worked in the Nationalist movement. But what kinds of pain had my grandmother known, refusing as she did the traditionally sanctioned dream of waiting for a man, a perfection no woman could be without? When she married it was relatively late in her life, to a man of her own choice. And my grandmother had never borne male offspring. But then her daughter, who had led a life sanctioned by culture and ceremony, agreeing to a man of her father’s choice, at the right time, in the right place, she too had lacked male offspring.
As I sat beside amma on the parapet, it came to me, like a petticoat string that cuts into flesh, like a metallic piece in a too-tight brassiere: the only way I had been able to make my way back into this house, into this family, was by marrying and having children. Somewhere at the back of my mind when I had married David, the thought had risen, like a dim, somewhat suffocating mist: Yes, this is a man from another country, not what they would really want, but now you can go home, you can face your parents. How that knowledge, when I had finally faced it, hurt me. And all around me in Delhi, those days in the very late seventies, the women’s movement was active. My friends, Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita of Manushi, were in the forefront of organizing against the spate of bride burnings that were taking place. As adult women we were facing the reality of women in arranged marriages—housewives and government workers, college lecturers and doctors, all young women married in accordance with their parents’ wishes—who were being burnt to death when their families of origin could not meet the demands for extra dowry. An exploding stove here, a burst can of kerosene there, matches that mysteriously caught flame when held to a dupatta or sari pallu.
Living in Delhi in those days amma had heard of the deaths and was deeply shocked. Sometimes she would have little arguments with appa who returned home tired from work.
“Dowry is a terrible sin, you know. Really. The bishops are taking a stand against it. The Metropolitan will make a statement soon, banning it. But will our people change?” He had listened quietly as he removed his shoes and settled down with a cup of tea. I wondered what was in his mind. And sometimes amma spoke to me.
“It’s not poverty, you know that, child. It’s all this craze for money that’s sweeping ordinary lives. People want a fridge from here, a scooter from there, chiffon saris from the other place. Also it’s in Delhi. I have never heard of such things in the south. This is a Punjabi thing. But those poor, poor girls.” Her cousin who was sitting there nodded her head.
“But, amma,” I had persisted, “you know, in your days there were wells. Women jumping into wells.” My aunt gave me a little stare and stirred her tea. Almost exactly my mother’s age, she was educated at an old established women’s college in New England and had returned, as befit a young woman of her social background, to an arranged marriage. My aunt and my mother were great friends and I knew that they sometimes shared news of young men and women from “good families” of appropriate blood and property lines, all of marriageable age.
“Amma, shall we talk now?” I wanted to start our conversation again before we were interrupted.
“Yes, yes, of course, you were asking me,” she said, feeling comfortable again, casting back to our conversation the night before while putting the children to bed.
“Last night, just as Adam and Svati were falling asleep, you asked me such a curious question. How I got to Allahabad. I got there because I married your appa. You know that. And he was working there in the government service. Why else would I go north? Why did you ask me?”
What could I say? Why indeed did I ask her; why did I need it explained to me as if I were a teenager again? So I could have it hot and clear in her own words, the age-old reasoning of women from which I wasn’t exempt? One went places by marriage. A feminine form of transportation and sanctioned well by culture. How else should a woman go places?
Earlier, at certain fragile moments in my life, I had been filled with fear at alternate possibilities. Without attachments I would shuttle back and forth, clutching at the toilet bowls in numerous international airports, lilac toilet bowls, white, blue, pink, gray; clutching the sides of metallic escalators, weeping, weeping into my own eyes. A few more years like that and I would be my own Aswan High Dam, burying my past in my own waters and I would never speak again for I would have swallowed my tongue in all that salt.
It had been hard living as a single woman in Hyderabad and, meeting David, I had felt that marriage, and the crossing of yet another border, might stitch me back into the shared world. So why should it seem strange to me that amma should marry a man she had just met once? David and I had decided to marry three weeks after meeting and we had immediately started on the task of packing up my books and papers and lugging them to the post office on Nampally Road. A crude enterprise. Amma at least had had custom and ceremony on her side.
Hadn’t the meeting with her future husband taken place in her own father’s house, arranged by relatives? Hadn’t she served him sweetmeats at that first meeting, head decorously covered with the fringe of her muslin sari? All the proper ceremonies had been observed. And surely there was nothing to regret. What followed was life, in all its roughness and irregularity and if it tore one up a little as it persisted, graying the hair at the temples, etching wrinkles into the fine skin of the forehead, bleaching expensive silks, what could be done? And amma had been married off, as she was starting to tell me, with high custom and ceremony.
In my own case the memory of a small improvised marriage in the Hyderabad courthouse, no family present, just three friends as witnesses and the countless faces staring in through the barred windows at the blonde foreigner I was marrying, still worked a bitterness in my mouth. How thin I had been at the time, how pinched with the difficulty of doing it all by myself. Yet David had taken the major responsibility, going back and forth to the courthouse to get the permission for the Special Marriage Act that we needed. At first the clerk of marriages had refused outright. Did my father know? Did my grandfather? Did I have permission? Mohammed Akhtar pursed his mouth, dug in his heels behind the huge metal desk. “No, no, no.” It had taken the intervention of a lawyer to get us the common right. And gradually, in the face of our persistence, the clerk of marriages felt his will corroded by pity. Once he glimpsed us hand in hand, David and I, crossing the busy street to the Blue Diamond Restaurant where steaming Chinese food was served. I used to live on fried chicken livers in those days. It was the only way I could keep the tension down. My time to get married had come and the dangers had to be braved. Appa and amma were in Delhi at the time and wanted nothing to do with the whole business. So David and I had arranged our own wedding, small, strange, abrupt, it seemed to me at the time. But the best we could do in the circumstances. Afterwards, in sheer delight at the whole thing being over, relieved, exhilarated at the sudden freedom we had caught a bus to Osman Sagar, found a room in a guest house, and then bathed the next morning in the clear opal waters of the lake, along with a goatherd and his small flock. David had lifted me up in the water and spun me around in all that blueness. Three weeks later, appa and amma had provided a grand reception in the Lodi Garden house in Delhi, complete with shamiana and hundreds of guests.
But the marriage itself, the wedding day, had been very hard on me. I had felt all the old dreams of feminine innocence broken into splinters. I had dressed for the event in a perfectly ordinary brown and white cotton sari, but Chirantan, one of our witnesses, a colleague of mine, said “Meena, whatever the ceremonial loss, it’s unthinkable you should marry in that color. Go, put on some red.” So I had obeyed his Rajasthani instinct and wrapped myself in a red kanjeevaram my parents had given me as a graduation gift ten years earlier. What had passed through Chirantan’s mind? Did he pity me? For he too was adventurous, having ventured into North America, searching out Saul Bellow, interviewing him, asking him about the Jewish sense of things. Did he know that my father-in-law-to-be was a rabbi?
Chirantan in those days was a big, bustling chap in his early thirties. He consulted an astrologer on a weekly basis: it was cheaper that way, and more precise too. The astrologer could add corrections to fate, figure out the stars on a more consistent basis. Chirantan also had a graduate student come to him all the way from Haryana, a gentleman who wore off-white turbans, and whose thoughts were gradually taking the form of a thesis: “The survivor in Saul Bellow’s fiction.” Once, for no discernible reason, meeting in the corridor, this gentleman and I discussed the Indic position on fate. “This the Jewish perspective does not permit,” he argued. I suggested he read the Abraham-Isaac story. Ilya had told me that tale again and again when I was a child, I felt it was filled with nothing but fate, that inexorable power that tangles with us, dissolving even desire into the black waters of death.
When I returned for the marriage ceremony in the courthouse, dressed in red, Chirantan had signaled his approval. “There, there, just as its written, Meena, it’s all already written.” Two years later he was dead of a cancerous tumor in the knee. Hearing of his death in America, the pity of it overwhelmed me. I thought of Chirantan who had helped me through the narrow gate of marriage, his kindness at the time.
“My father, your Ilya, felt I had reached the right age. The right age is very important, you know.” Amma cast a sidelong glance at her three daughters, crowding around her on the parapet. The cool wind brought the scent of jasmine that grew in clusters by the side of the steps, and the delicate, more elusive scent of box that had blossomed on the far side of the well. Grandmother Kunju had planted that bush, Elsa explained to me one morning. I had forgotten that. Amma’s voice continued:
“College was over and it was the thing to do. Those days no one consulted girls very much and my father wanted it. He was busy and getting old. Everyone wanted to see me married. I didn’t know anything about your appa except that he was working in Karachi. I hadn’t even heard of the Meteorological Department! Imagine that, a whole department dealing with the weather!”
My sisters and I leant against our mother, laughing together. Quite gently now, we teased her for marrying a strange man, for not choosing her own mate. She enjoyed the teasing. After all, the man was our father, and where would we be without him? He was behind us somewhere on the veranda, walking with slow careful steps, holding his head and shoulders straight, breathing hard. After the heart attack the doctor had asked him to walk as much as he could in the shelter of the house. Nowadays appa never stepped out, unless it was into the car that would take him to hospital for his checkup. He was too weak. A slight exertion here or there, opening a window too hard, pulling out a heavy book, a jot too much wind, and his blood pressure would rise, and he could feel his head flooding with blackness. But with care, things might be stabilized. His pacing comforted us, his wife and three daughters, all together now under the same roof.
“The real go-between for the arrangement was Oomechayen, my distant cousin, you know. He used to walk back and forth between the families with all the relevant news.” I thought of my thin, pale, aristocratic uncle, dressed always immaculately in starched clothes, a gold wristwatch prominently displayed on his thin forearm. Imagined him walking in the midday heat between Kozencheri and Tiruvella, muttering as the passing bullock carts splattered him with the soft stinky stuff that bullocks let slip to ease themselves as they trot, mounds and mounds of coiled black stuff. Imagined him flicking his umbrella, wiping his cheeks with a silk handkerchief, muttering long strings of English conjugations that he so delighted in.
“Oomechayen was quite keen on the marriage, you know. In any case it would have been the joining of his two families and it was his duty as the eldest son-in-law. Then appa’s father was interested. The next step was for me to be taken to Oomechayen’s house so they could look me over. They must have approved of me. But I still hadn’t met the boy. He was in Karachi at the time. Yes, yes, when he came for the first time to see me, he stayed on for lunch, which two of my own aunts came and cooked. Chicken broiled with spices, payasam, just a Kerala lunch.”
I was puzzled. Did she talk to him?
“He wasn’t shy at all. I thought he wouldn’t eat, given the circumstances, visiting a new house and all that. But he had a good lunch and filled his stomach. I sat at the table, too, you know. He stayed for a little while. Ilya was anxious till the final word of approval came from the boy. Oomechayen brought word the next morning and within a few weeks I was married.”
“Yes, yes. Appa had already had an interview for going to England, and veliappechan was keen that he marry before going. What if he should meet one of those Madamas! The whole family would be ruined. The only son and all that. So the marriage had to be quick; in any case no one wants these things to drag on. Nowadays, of course, if people arrange a marriage with a boy in America, it can take months for the boy to come. And who can tell how he’s been living there? In our day, of course, those problems weren’t there. Before a boy went abroad to study he had to be settled.”
She paused a little and looked out into the garden, squinting into the sun. Appa too had stopped his regular pacing. He couldn’t carry it on for more than ten minutes. He had returned to rest in the side bedroom where their two beds lay, separated now, after his last illness, by the rosewood desk and chair. It was easier that way to get up in the night, fetch water or medicine, or set up the oxygen cylinders if need be.
Through the bright haze of afternoon sun I saw the children. Amma waved to them. As Adam raised his hand to wave back, the makeshift swing wobbled precariously. They were on the swing now, both my children, cramped in sheer delight onto the piece of jackfruit wood Raju had wedged with rope and hung from the low lying branch of the incense tree.
The incense tree dominated the front garden. Its smooth knob-bled roots were visible for at least twenty feet around the tree, edged out in one direction, where the driveway curved around to the porch. It was as if the roots of the tree, which was planted just before my grandfather’s death, had never managed to dig into soil, but remained there, a visible frailty, clutching the earth. Yet there was immense strength in the coiled woody stuff. Sap ran through, and clearly there was a staying power that balanced the tree with its great hood of glossy leaves and delicate clusters of beige flowers. After the flowers came the fruit. Hard incense fruit. The fruit was treasured, for out of it could come other incense trees whose bark, when stripped and burnt, would permit ceremonial offerings to be made, in churches and temples and in places where the dead are honored.
Before Adam was born, amma had written to me of the first blossoms of that tree. It had taken almost two decades of flower. It was March in New York when I got her letter describing the thick leaves, the pale petals of the flower parted at the glistening stamens. “The first blossom after Ilya’s death,” she told me in the letter. I knew she was wishing me well with the birth. Thousands of miles away, in a small sublet apartment on the Upper West Side, its walls jammed with little curios and keepsakes belonging to an old lady who had headed south to Florida for the winter, I leant against an old couch, read her writing on the flimsy blue air letter form.
That evening David took me to his mother’s house for supper. After the meal, as others cleared the plates, I sat on Toby’s brown upholstered couch and listened to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” a piece I had loved for many years, ever since hearing it played in the concert hall in Khartoum, the hands of the pianist imported from Brussels for the occasion, tripping over the scales as outside on the streets and flat white houses the desert moon rose.
But in the moonlight imagined in my head it wasn’t that North African desert town that came to me, but a garden whose every inch I had known in childhood, and at the heart of the garden, a tree with shining leaves and dipping blossoms I had never seen. I saw Ilya’s hands planting the tiny shoot, Bhaskaran watering it, the coiled bark thickening year after year till the time for blossoms had come.
I was eleven when Ilya died after those terrible months of heart pain. “The heart is a muscle,” someone once told me, “it cramps like anything else.” I could not bear to weep for him, when he died. A hand as dark as incense bark shoved the pain inside me: when it trickled out, from time to time, there was an acid taste to it, as if iron had mingled with stream water underground, out of sight. Listening to that tinkling music in a room high above the Hudson River, I felt the old pain rise. But I had no strength to hold it in. The tears dripped down my cheek onto the blue pinafore a friend in Paris had lent me. I shut my mouth with both hands for fear I would howl, as a hyena might, for my home, my native town, a great tree blossoming in moonlight.
Sometimes I feel things not physically there, but feel them anyway and they hint at a truth, even if it’s hard to unpack till years later. So it was with the tears streaming out as I sat on Toby’s couch. I felt the actual tears; as they streamed down I felt them taking my skin off, ever so gently, with them. It wasn’t just my skin they took off. It was also the topsoil, a ruddy brown color it gets in Kerala during the rainy season. The soil parted, and out came a sticky child, its hands clamped together with blood. I placed my trembling palms on my belly and shut my eyes tight. I saw an old man’s body dance in the light and fall away, dissolving, making an aura all around the half-born child. I saw the child’s hands making fists. Then his wet bloody head emerged.
Now he sat there, a stone’s throw away from me in Tiruvella, squished next to his sister on a swing under the green leaves. I could hear him shouting at her, into the wind.
“What is it? Should I stop?’ Amma had caught a curious look on my face. “No, please, please go on.” I didn’t want amma’s voice to stop.
My sister Elsa shifted on her knees and started laughing, boisterously. “You don’t want us to hear your adventures!”
“No, of course I’ll go on. A huge kotil was laid out for my marriage. Are you listening? Anna, Elsa, do you know the difference between a pandal and a kotil? A pandal has a flat roof, a kotil a sloping one. Both of course are thatched. A kotil was constructed. It ran from the old mango tree, remember where it was, over there.”
“Yes, the tree Ilya knocked a nail into. It needed iron. The copper bracelets on it weren’t working.” I was impatient now.
She smiled at me. “My mother’s sister, Amukochamma, arrived two weeks before the actual date. Also Ilya’s sister, Chenagerileamachi. All the arrangements had to be made. It was the end of April 1947. The wedding was due to take place on May first. There was no water to be had. The well here was all dried up. The water had to be carried all the way from the Mar Thoma Church in Kuttapuzah in buckets and brass pitchers, and it was stored in urns in the kitchen and all the side verandas. A whole row of shining urns, imagine, on the veranda.”
She raised her delicate hand and conjured up the invisible urns, filled with clear water in preparation for her wedding.
“The lunch was the usual sort.” Amma’s voice was going on. Behind her the crows were droning on in the guava tree.
“Usual. I don’t know what that means.” I laughed to hide my confusion. “Remember I was a child here, then slap-walap, it all went. I don’t know about all the wedding stuff!”
*
For years, even when my life had taken me so very far away, I had had a fantasy of marriage. I saw myself married in the Mar Thoma Church down the road, feasting on all the savories and sweetmeats the finest cooks of Tiruvella could provide. I don’t know quite where that longing had come from. After all, in those old days when Aswathy and I sat collecting silk and gold slippers, trying them on, curling out our toes to hobble over the cool verandas, our pavades tucked up so we wouldn’t fall and shame ourselves, I was of a different opinion. I saw no benefit in marriage at all. The game rather bored me.
“Aaoiu, aiouo, kalyanithe pogeno?” Aswathy sang out in her lilting, high-pitched voice. She was quite clear about what she wanted. We shoved ourselves together under the roots of an old banyan that grew in her grandmother’s yard and compared notes.
“I want lots of chappals, the silk kind you get in Seemati in Kottayam. And Benares silk and barfis with silver and gold on them. And shiny necklaces, ruby and diamonds.” She prodded me in the side with her elbow. I was a little uncomfortable, though the games were sparked up when, pretending to be bride and groom, we tried on the chappals.
“But where would I put them, Aswathy?” I was worried about the huge number of chappals she wanted to collect. She giggled, not bothering to reply. “I want to have elephants too, at the marriage, a real brass band.” Brass bands were all the rage. One had to travel as far south as Trivandrum to see a real one, and the instruments were polished, glinting, mixed up with shenai and mridangam too. After all, just to have trumpets and trombones would have been too absurd.
“Gold slippers. You wore gold slippers, didn’t you?” Elsa challenged amma.
“I want to hear about the food. Let her go on,” I interrupted, hoping I could restore myself. I felt all lopsided, unsure. The gold slippers were part of an impossible dream. Suddenly I felt tired. I longed for her voice go on and bathe me in the downpour of detail, all the fragrant solid things.
“There were three fish preparations: meen veyichede, meen patichade, meen varathade.” The first is a Kerala delicacy, fish bathed in its own juices, moistened in a three-day marinade of tamarind and red chili. The second, normally made with tiny silvery fishes from the backwaters of the Arabian Sea, has mounds of coconut flesh, scraped into freckled bits, fried with turmeric and onions. The third involves a fleshy sea fish, swordfish or parrot fish, fried in a paste of ground spices and garnished with coriander.
“Then meats of course: both olothiede, curried, also a chicken. We had eriseri with lentils and ghee. Then papadam.”
I imagined the rich gravy from the chicken, blended with yogurt, flowing into the vindaloo paste that basted the fiery lamb. Papadams, fried fit to pop, hoisted themselves over the edge of the banana leaf. The eriseri with lentils and vegetables was mellow, cooling, set in a little dish to the side.
“We also had cutlets and bread.”
“European style?”
“Yes.” She laughed, slightly embarrassed but also pleased at my remark.
“That was only for the guests, not for the housefolk. Of course we also had sambar, maure, kachimaure. All this and the meats and fishes had to be given to our friends and relatives, their servants and their families and friends.
“Yes, yes,” she tossed her head. “We had lots of people to help. Manpower was not a problem in those days. Thoma and Bapu who had worked for Ilya when he was principal at the Mar Thoma Seminary came a whole month ahead. Bit by bit they started making all the arrangements. Of course my aunts and uncles oversaw it all. The house was overflowing.”
“Where did people sit to eat?” Behind us, the large rooms filled with old wooden furniture, with teak and rosewood and mahogany, echoed in the silence. The children too were silent, off the swing now, picking at stones to make into a mound.
“The men sat in the kotil. Mats were laid out end to end, covering every inch of ground. Banana leaves were placed in rows on the mats. The women sat inside the house. In almost all the rooms the doors were flung wide open and the back courtyard too was filled with guests.”
“Did people come from appa’s side? Yes?”
“Bus loads of people. Who they were I still have no idea.”
She was quiet for a minute. How bewildering it must have seemed as she washed her face, or sat at the edge of the mura to have her hair done, the aunt combing down the long black waves then poising them on the flat of her hand before tightening the heft. Did she murmur at all, my amma, did she ask, “All this, is all this about me?”
But the story was far from done and we wanted to hear more. In our impatience we pushed on. And amma was in the mood now to speak on. It was as if the past, released in her, was bubbling out. Curved around our mother on the old veranda, we were the very listeners she would have wanted. Once her own flesh rounded out, now broken free from her, we framed her words.
“Don’t you want to hear what I wore?”
“You know I do.” My voice seemed low, hoarse even to me.
“Of course, tell us, amma, tell us,” Anna spoke. In spite of ourselves we were happy at the feast of silver and gold and brocade our mother would draw up for us, treasures of impossible weight, part of a forgotten story. Not one of us three sisters would enter that old world. But the imagination might draw us into it. The web of our mother’s words warmed us as the chill monsoon wind started to blow.
“I wore gold. With pearls studded in. And a few rubies on rings and all that. But it was very simple, you know. My youngest aunt believed in a clear line of jewelry. Something simple and fine. I was in Tiruvella, so we had to send to Madras for the wedding clothing. I didn’t choose the clothes, my aunt Sosakochamma did. Her husband was a professor of pathology at Madras Medical College in those days. She had time on her hands and was delighted to help. My own mother was dead, you know that.”
She paused, looked at her hands. They lay quiet in her lap, clasped one in the other, a blue vein visible by the left wrist.
“I sent a blouse for size and she chose the saris. The sari I wore to church was white Benares tissue. The war was just over and the sari was considered very expensive in those days. With a brocade border and buttas. I had a silver tissue blouse to go with it. Yes, the chappals were quite lovely, a silver pair to match the brocade in the tissue sari. I had a gold pair as well. The manthrakodi was heavy gold brocade. We said that the boy’s side need not bring it. Normally they do. They present it to the girl and she covers her head with it in church at the culmination of the marriage ceremony. But we said that they needn’t. Who knows what their taste would be in these matters. And suppose it didn’t please us? My aunts, your great-aunts you know, were a little nervous of the Kozencheri—Raani people, your father’s father’s side. They were not as Westernized as we were and might go in for something rather gaudy. So my youngest aunt chose the manthrakodi too.”
I had seen the sari with the patterns of turquoise and blue and sapphire let into the golden flowers that lit the pallu. I had run my fingers over the little bumps in the brocade, set the fine silk to my cheeks, and draping myself in it, I had stood in front of my grandmother’s rosewood mirror. How dark the mirror had seemed with the monsoon clouds passing through the bamboo grove, shutting out the sun. I could hardly make out the contours of my own face, or trace out my eyes, dark as amma’s, that did the seeing. Only the sari shone, as if the elaborate silk so many fingers had woven two decades earlier had taken on a life of its own, shrinking my female flesh that held itself upright within the coverture.
Normally the sari was kept wrapped up in muslin in my Kozencheri grandmother’s rosewood chest. Grandmother Mariamma had brought the chest with her as part of her dowry and now her only daughter-in-law used it. The sari had lain in that chest, wrapped up in elaborate tissues and lighter burdens of silks, studded with coils of camphor that would help keep it from decay.
I wanted amma to take the sari out, let it see the common light of day, let the breezes that blew in from the Arabian Sea waft over it, let a little of the dust from the garden touch its golden creases. Perhaps we could all sit there, in the sunlight, and look at it for a minute or two, perhaps someday my little girl, born and bred on the side streets of the upper west side of Manhattan would return to this very house, this garden, to drape the brocade over her delicate brown hair and gaze into her great-grandmother’s mirror. What would that garment be for her? What would she see in that mirror?
“Well, in case you were wondering, I sold it.”
Amma’s voice butted into my daydream as we sat on the veranda ledge.
“Yes, of course it was gold tissue and fetched a good price. It cost about five hundred rupees in those days. I sold it all two years ago and got a lot of money. More than two thousand rupees.”
“Without telling us, you sold it?” I leant forward, shocked.
“Yes, it was all discolored. A man came by to buy up gold and silver brocade so I got him to weigh it all and sold it. I gave the money to a missionary effort. I told appa, of course. It will build a hospital or help towards a school in Nagaland.”
Appa was beside us now. He had risen from his bed and returned to the veranda for some fresh air. He moved forward, slowly, anxious to put a word in.
“It was fine to sell it, but about that sari, I must tell you, her mother’s people were all snobs. That’s what they were. They wanted her to be covered in gold. Her father was a simple man. Only wore khadi. Even in church for her wedding that was what he wore.”
“They were not snobs. You know that,” amma retorted, bitten to the quick. “Why, they were even fond of you. Seven priests and the Metropolitan married us in the private chapel. There was incense and hours of prayers and you slipped the minu over my neck and there it hangs!”
She pointed at her throat. In the folds of her neck lay a chiseled gold thing, mangalsutra, icon of marriage. In rough weather, and her bond with him had led her through much of that, I often saw my mother’s fine brown fingers twisting by her throat. And as her fingers tightened the gold thing disappeared into her fist.
My little sister Elsa leant forward quickly, her gestures precise as ever. She touched my mother on her trembling wrist. She wanted to set things right, get the story going again. As I got up to get my father some tea from the kitchen, I heard her ask about the wedding guests of forty-three years ago:
“There must have been Raani people too. Surely?”
Raani was in the hills, where my Kozencheri grandfather’s brothers lived, all seven of them, with their fierce warlike brood. Almost without stop the Raani people spawned male heirs, then swooped down to get women for them. They were landowners in that rough red soil, infinitely fertile with coconut and areca nut. At night the Raani people sang hymns like everyone else, to God the Father, Jesus His son, and all the angels. The hymns turned into boisterous shouts, bordering on boxing songs or songs that are sung during the Onam boat races.
A week earlier, having just heard of appa’s illness—several months after the crisis, word had got through by way of a baker’s son who studied at Mar Thoma College across the paddy fields from us—the cousins descended on us. They came in jeeps packed to bursting with husbands, wives, children, even several grandmothers in their chatta and mundu, whose toothless mouths closed kindly over the fried bananas I served them, as they sat almost dozing in the assorted armchairs in the living room. The tiny male children raced around like wildfire, all over the kitchen, pulling at the cat’s tails, trying to slam the geckos that were lazing in the kitchen heat into the flat of the walls. The young mothers, plump and well starched, watched over their daughters in starched frocks, and made sure husbands had enough to eat and drink. One or two came to help me in the kitchen, for they had chosen a moment to come when the two women who cooked for us, both named Aminey, who cooked for us were absent. Amma was far away, across the railway tracks at a prayer meeting.
Appa was tired, lay in bed, his blood pressure high. One of his Raani cousins, born almost the same day of 1921 he was, sat next to him, holding his hand lovingly, a grown man with glasses, weeping over his cousin-brother. I saw tears trickle down my father’s eyes as I took the tea in. In the darkened bedroom they sat, the two men, silent now, having met for years only at funerals and baptisms. As young children they had spent summers together in Raani and Kozencheri. Pauloschayen had established a restaurant business on his return from years of work as an accountant in Dubai. He was modest, in spite of all the money he had amassed, and had plowed a large portion back into his plantations of rubber and coconut. Appa had studied, gone to England, joined the government service, his Kerala connections attenuated in all those years abroad, but still thick and dark as blood in a man’s forearm. So he lay there, my father, propped up on pillows as I took in the tea, the tears on his face shining in the half light from the window.
Behind them, Pauloschayen’s eldest son, probably around my age, sat quietly. He suffered from gout. The swollen legs had prevented him from traveling to supervise his restaurants and bakeries. He did what he could from home. My appa has no sons, only three daughters and I am the oldest. I am conscious of that often when I face my father. I must be to him a little of what a son might be, but how unequal I feel to that emotion that wells up in him at odd moments, especially after his illness, how useless I feel. Longing to be what my father would have wanted me to be, equal to his needs, to carry on his line, I wish for a moment what I have never wished before: that I might have been born male.
In the cool bedroom, I pulled a table up to the bedside and rested the teacups there. I arranged the plateful of Marie biscuits and the avalos unda and walked out. I left the three men alone in the quiet breeze that dipped the muslin curtains in the dim sunlight that fell on my father’s face. I said nothing. In the living room, one of the Raani wives, just fresh out of Women’s Christian College, Madras, was chucking her husband under the chin, popping a fried banana into his mouth. I stared at her.
Then I looked around for Elsa, my little sister. Where was she? I needed some support. She and Anna had refused to come out of the small side room that had been Ilya’s study. The room was secure. To get into it, if the main door was locked, you had to pass through the master bedroom, and no visitors would do that casually. So they stayed there, letting me take care of the Raani people. Anna lived in Madras and taught French in a college. She wrote poetry. In her early thirties, she felt quite rightly that the Raani folk must surely regard her as odd, some sort of aberration, for not having married. It was a feeling I was familiar with, having felt that hot pang when, still unmarried, I had returned home many years ago to suffer under the gaze of gathered relatives.
Elsa, the youngest, was firm and clear. She had cropped her hair short in the new Madras style, wore jeans on most occasions, had little patience with arranged marriages, and said so quite openly. She was Anna’s great friend and had obviously decided to keep her sister company in the inner room. Marriage was the stumbling block, the high threshold stone over which a woman might enter. And she would either walk or fall, bruising herself cruelly.
The Raani family had an elaborate system of connections, all readied in time for the marriage of a daughter—young men of suitable family background in Rourkela and Sagar, in Quatar and Lincoln (Nebraska) or even closer to home, in Vishakapatanam or Perumbavoor. The connections were established through an elaborate network of go-betweens and relatives and even neighbors aching to be in the family’s good books. And at least at the outset the system had worked.
Each of the Raani daughters had been married off within a few months of graduating from high school or from college. After all, once a few months had passed while a marriageable young woman loitered between kitchen, drawing room, and the well side, anything might happen. Especially if she bound jasmine blossoms in her hair, or dried out her silks all alone by the hibiscus grove, fires might start crackling, tongues would wag, and not even the good lord could prevent the consequences. Nothing but shame could ensue, household shame, female madness, death.
A week earlier Chackochen, a nephew, who had first received the news of appa’s illness, had been sent ahead to visit. A taciturn man, he sat for an entire half hour in the living room, drinking his coffee and saying absolutely nothing. His sister Nisha, a few years older than I, had been married off fifteen years earlier to a man from a good family and with a good job in a whiskey factory in Saskatchewan. But recently news had come of Nisha’s husband’s misdeeds, his heavy drinking, and then of the beatings he inflicted on poor Nisha, who had been forced to move in with the pastor of the evangelical church she regularly attended. The brother felt his sister’s shame, but what could he do? When amma inquired after Nisha, his face grew tight.
“Who can say? In Canada, who can say?”
He could not forget he had approved the choice of Nisha’s husband. Finally he softened, feeling how burdensome his silence was. It was only appa, a man of few words, who had seemed to understand his relative’s speechlessness.
“I’ve picked out three girls,” Chackochen blurted out, referring to his nephew who had just finished at IIT Bombay in electrical engineering, “one after the other, all picked out, waiting for him.”
“Good, good,” appa murmured.
It was one of his easier days, when his asthma was not too difficult and he was able to leave his bed and keep us company in the living room. Chackochen’s nephew had just been offered a job in Delhi with BHEL and the thought of three girls, each dressed in a bright silk sari, each with a college degree in hand, must surely have been gratifying. Encouraged by his senior cousin, Chackochen plunged in.
“And for the younger lad there’s a girl I have in mind. It’s not a bad family but they fell on hard times and the mother trained as a nurse. She went straight from Kuwait to Arkansas in America. Of course, the girl may be a bit fat, I hear.”
He leant forward slightly worried. It was a common perception in Kerala that those who went westward grew fatter. It was the general bonhomie, the good life in America. But on women weight was no longer encouraged. Even the film stars in Kerala were fast losing weight. The regular three hundred pounds, the old style of beauty, much vaunted, much publicized through movies high and low, was no longer considered desirable. It was rumored that even the actress who did the notorious Avede Rathri, which I had seen at the Lighthouse in Hyderabad, soft porn with its sequin-clad heroine, crawling on the floor, twitching all her parts, was considering losing a few pounds. Weight loss clinics and retreats using the ayurvedic formulations were springing up all over the state. “Kutianna,” baby elephant, formerly an affectionate term for a lady of a certain girth, was no longer in currency.
“But who can tell?” Chackochen of the huge biceps and the catering business and the sister suffering in Saskatchewan, returned to the possibilities for his older nephew. “We still haven’t set eyes on her, just photos. It’s from photos and hearsay, all this.”
“There are diets, everyone uses them these days. Why even the Manorama advertises one,” amma pitched in, trying to show her concern, trying to show her Raani relative how within the bounds of reason his worries were.
“Well, we hope to settle it soon, both sons, perhaps a double wedding in Raani.” He perked up at his own words.
This time, Chackochen had not come with the rest of the family. I walked through the rooms, making sure that food was on everyone’s plate, that the children had not come to harm. Suddenly the doors blew open and amma entered, her arms laden with mangoes that the woman, in whose house the prayer meetings were held, had presented her. “There, there, give them to the grandchildren.” And her eyes shining, she moved forward to embrace her relatives.
So she had arrived, my mother, gray hair flying out of her hairpins, arms laden with half-ripe mangoes, her white cotton sari with the blue flowers on it, drawn tight round her ample waist. The Raani daughters-in-law, her own age, fell upon her and embraced her. The eldest presented her with the elichi she had plucked with her own hands from the family plantation. “I shall treasure it,” amma said firmly, slipping it into her silver paandaan that had lain empty awhile. In all the bustle at home, she had not had time to fill it.
That night, after the guests had left, and the children were asleep, something moved in me. I walked out of the bedroom, unbolted the large double doors, and entered the garden. As I raised my face into the night air, the stars wheeled in slow, languorous patterns that quickened as I gazed upwards, till dizzy with the pressure of that massive, frenetic light I stooped, and touched the knob-bled roots of the incense tree.
It felt like something so old that it had no need any longer of the sorts of life we commonly trust, life filled with motion, volition, palpable heft. It felt like an iron slowness in the blood, elephant hide on an ancient temple wall. I sat on the ground, no longer conscious of the house behind me. I knelt, running both hands over the fine cracks in the earth near the incense roots. I touched my cheeks to the root cover. I felt a small ant crawl over my lips. I picked up a rough incense fruit, set it to my mouth, and tasted raw earth. I felt I needed the peace of a place where there was no more marrying, no more taking in marriage. And in bright moonlight, on the soil of my grandmother’s garden, for a few moments I felt I had found it.
Returning to the house, I entered the drawing room and bolted the doors behind me, then walked over to the carved table and the silver box that rested on its surface. I pushed aside the elichi the Raani relatives had brought for amma and added to the box with the silver handle and the carvings of elephants and lotus blossoms, a rough dark fruit, the fruit of the incense tree on which my children had swung.
The next morning I stared past the swelling incense tree with its hard brown fruit, towards the gate. The front gate gave onto the Kottayam–Mallapally road and the buses were racing past. One, two, three, four. Children clambered up onto the ledge to watch them. The buses were racing towards the Tiruvella junction, right next to the old Syrian Christian Seminary where my parents had been married, where Ilya and grandmother Kunju were buried. Some of the buses would stop there, others would pause briefly in the traffic and race on. Now as the buses passed so swiftly with their bright red and green paint, with images of Lord Jesus or Lord Krishna painted on the front, the human faces that pressed out of the windows in a terrible crush, struggling to breathe, made a density of flesh that threatened to blow the metal frames apart, blow the painted gods into smithereens. Some of the travelers, the more intrepid ones, hugged the luggage racks on the roofs. One young man had cleverly roped himself on. Only his Hawaii chappals made of cheap pink plastic threatened to fall off, as the bus that bore him outraced the monsoon winds that swept off the Arabian Sea into our southern town.