Monsoon Summer Page 10

  He ordered eggs and bacon for me and something called an appam, a kind of thin, flat pancake, for himself. He wrote the words carefully on a napkin as if for a child.

  “Is it lovely to eat that thing again?” I watched him tear it into bite-sized pieces with practiced hands and dip it into what he told me was coconut chutney.

  “Yes,” he said. In the awkward silence that followed, I looked around the dining room. Four other Indian couples sat, half-secreted behind the palms or wooden posts. They were absolutely silent; all I could hear was the scrapings of their spoons, their gulps as they drank chai, and the bleak thought came: I wonder if he’ll stop talking to me now.

  After breakfast, he said we should stroll down to Cochin Harbor and make sure the tea chests had been taken off the ship. After that, we would find a bank, open an account, and change our one hundred and twenty-three pounds into rupees, and I could feel my spirits lightening, as if this anxious in-between day needed a proper job to do to give it shape.

  “I’ll show you around the old town too.” He smiled the sudden, thrilled smile that made me fall in love with him in the first place, the smile that made his eyes light up, a seam of green and tortoiseshell, and the dimples that made him look about ten again. “And then shall we have lunch, and go back to bed . . .”

  He did his Groucho Marx suggestive eyebrows, and I laughed and longed to kiss him but remembered, in the nick of time, not to: on the ship coming out, he’d warned me that in India it wasn’t done for a man and a woman to hold hands in public. Not even married people.

  * * *

  The sun was eye-piercingly bright as we walked, an hour later, towards the Fort Cochin seafront. An old beggar lay half-naked under a tree, his eyes covered in flies, and the smell of old fish rose periodically from the rubbish-strewn drains.

  Anto had the look of an eager boy as he picked up speed and rushed towards the dazzling sea, where more ships were coming in, and when we reached the water’s edge, I heard him groan and saw him pass his hand over his face.

  “Beautiful,” I heard him murmur in a dazed voice. I didn’t know what to say. The palm trees, the aquamarine sea, the cloudless blue sky, all looked to me like stage scenery to which the smell of fish and bad drains had been added.

  “It hasn’t changed a bit,” he said softly, sadly.

  “I always think a place will change if I’m not there.” I could hear myself babbling nervously as we walked further down the seafront, when what I really wanted to do was to hug him, to say, “How wonderful—you’re home,” or some such, but I felt uncomfortably surplus to requirements. Not Wanted on Voyage, because there was nothing here that spoke to me, not yet.

  “My father had his law offices over there,” he said, when we’d got to the end of a stretch of cracked concrete. “Just behind the English Club, there.” He pointed towards an elegant building set back from the seafront and surrounded by lawns. I looked over the hedge at the well-ordered building, with its potted plants and fine shrubs. Now the green, orange, and white flags of the new India fluttered from the veranda.

  “Look at it.” Anto seemed stunned. “We thought it the height of elegance when we were children. My brother and I sat in the car while my father had fierce games of chess with his old pal, Hugo Bateman, his English barrister hero. My father usually won. We were proud of that.”

  “A nice place to come and play,” was all I could think of.

  “Not really.” Anto was squinting at one of the placards, arranged on the veranda, “My father couldn’t even enter the club without Mr. Bateman’s permission. That was always made clear to us.” He gave a curious lopsided grin.

  “What do they say. The signs?”

  “Um . . . let me see . . . Malayalam may not come instantly,” he said, a playful mimic again, “Ur . . . well, sorry for this, madam, but ‘Quit India’ . . . and ‘India is ours again,’ but you, my beautiful Lady Sahib are not to take it personally please. You’re my wife,” he added softly, “you are most welcome. Do you like it so far?”

  “Yes,” I said, my smile quick and insincere. “Of course I do.” We were passing a group of very old women squatting on their haunches in front of piles of fish laid out on burlap sacking. They stared at me.

  “Those,” he told me. “These are the famous Chinese fishing nets.” He pointed towards two skinny old men performing what looked like a lithe and practiced dance as they hauled up large stones and pulleys, followed by a net full of gleaming, jumping fish.

  “Our physics master from Ignatius College once brought us here to watch them,” Anto told me. “He said that these nets were ‘a little miracle of design.’ A brilliant use of energy and counterbalancing weights. When the stone goes down, the nets go up. No stony, no fishy.”

  I smiled at him. I liked the way he knew how things worked, his good memory for certain facts and solid things. It felt masculine to me, another kind of counterbalancing weight.

  Next, while we were walking around a drain that oozed what looked like oily manure, he told me that India had once led the world in modern sanitation, that its drains, chutes, cesspits, and clever devices for moving rubbish out of town would be the envy of the modern world today.

  He was warming to his theme when he glanced at me and, seeing my expression, said, “Good pillow talk, hey?” and we burst out laughing, and I was relieved, even for one brief moment, to have my old, clever, funny Anto back again.

  On our way back to the hotel, we passed a large Indian family, eight or ten people, padding slowly and companionably down the seafront. The two men, dressed in Western suits, and their wives in violently colored saris of the brightest apricots and pinks and lime greens, their arms covered in bangles.

  “Most women here don’t wear the sari,” Anto explained to me, pointing to another woman in a plain white long skirt and blouse. “They wear that: the chatta and mundu—quite boring by comparison.”

  The gaggle of children who followed them walked backwards to stare at me: the white woman in the white dress with the white hat on.

  When one of children—a cheeky-looking boy—muttered something that made the men laugh, a strange little line of poetry (one of my mother’s favorites) wafted into my mind.

  Oh why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much?

  O fat white woman whom nobody loves.

  I kept it to myself (knowing he would instantly assure me of my own slimness, lovedness, and so forth), and also because he’d strode a little ahead of me, pleased to remember a shortcut, through a gap in the fence and down a path, that took us past the English Club.

  Close to the club, I could see part of the veranda had been damaged and several windows boarded up. A skinny cat dashed from under the house with something in its mouth. When I asked Anto if the riots had been bad here, he stared at the building and said, “Nothing like as bad as the riots and massacres up north. But my family were sparing with information, so I don’t really know yet.” He picked up some empty firework shell from the veranda that must have been part of the victory celebrations. “I only really know what I read in the London Times.”

  * * *

  We threaded our way down a bustling street: rickshaws and stray goats, street merchants selling buckets and bright sweets, lurid papier-mâché gods, a whole head of lamb buzzing with flies. It felt exciting, and I wanted to explore, but he was intent on showing me the Church of Saint Francis, where, he said, Vasco da Gama had been buried before they moved his body back to Portugal. I trailed dutifully behind him into a large building with curved sides like ship sails.

  He dipped his hand in the holy water near the door and made a sign of the cross—a surprise for me; he’d told me he was a lapsed Catholic.

  I felt he wanted to be alone, and a few moments later, l watched him from a distance: this handsome stranger—my husband—sitting in soft candlelight, eyes tigh
tly shut, face gleaming with sweat, surrounded by stained glass and stone effigies, and the thought came to me: I hope he’s not regretting this already.

  - CHAPTER 13 -

  “Do you have an aspirin in your handbag?” he asked me on the following day. We were speeding in a battered taxi towards Mangalath, his family home, one hour’s drive from Fort Cochin.

  “Sorry, no,” I said. “Headache?” He looked so pale and distant.

  “Not really.”

  I’d heard him, in the middle of the night, groaning as though in the grips of some kind of nerve storm.

  “All right, darling?” I said when he came to bed, hoping he would confide in me.

  “I’m fine.” And then, after a long and expectant pause, there was a sucking sound as he turned his back on me. “Thank you,” he said politely, before he went to sleep.

  He’d expected the family car to be sent for us with a driver, but a note left for us at the hotel that we were to take a taxi had clearly perplexed and hurt him. I wondered if this was a concealed snub but kept the thought to myself.

  It was so hot in the taxi that my dress stuck to the seat, and I felt sick as our driver, a juicy sniffer, drove hectically, one hand on the wheel, through ramshackle villages and potholed roads. And then, on the edge of town, quite suddenly, we were in the most spectacularly beautiful country I had ever seen: a dream of water and earth and sky, where bright-green fields and gorgeously colored trees seemed to float on a series of lakes and waterways, lagoons and backwaters, connected by fragile bridges. Anto stared stonily out the window, hardly moving.

  We were crossing a bridge, approaching the village of Aroor, when he turned to me as if remembering I was there.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked, at last acknowledging the momentous day ahead. “You will shortly disappear under a mountain of relatives, and I’m afraid they will be very, very curious about you.”

  “Not nervous,” I lied. “Excited.” And then, “Is it all very changed?”

  “I’ve changed,” he said softly. He was looking at a small boat adrift in a dazzling stretch of water, sailing towards the horizon.

  “It looks like a giant picture postcard,” I said, feeling like a hearty aunt in my startling unoriginality. “It’s nice to see it with you.”

  When we stopped on the road at a tea shop selling cigarettes and sweets, Anto arranged for us and our luggage to be transferred to a horse and cart. The horse stood in the fierce sunlight, its eyes obliterated by flies. Its barefoot owner cut the top off a coconut with a machete and offered Anto a glass of its milk, which he downed with an ecstatic look. He told me not to drink it until my stomach got stronger; we’d be home soon. I said nothing. I was too hot, and too anxious to talk because we were nearly there. After ten minutes or so, down a dusty road lined with palm trees, Anto gripped my hand tightly.

  “We’re less than a mile away,” he said when we’d reached a fork in the road. “Half a mile, one hundred yards.” Figures seemed all he could manage now.

  And suddenly, there it was: a small stone gatehouse against a lush backdrop of trees, and a wooden sign with Mangalath written on it.

  Anto exhaled slowly. “This is it.” He let go of my hand. The horse clip-clopped through an avenue of wonderful trees: as bold and showy as cancan dancers, with their waxy blossoms and strangely shaped leaves.

  In a gap between the trees, there was half an acre or so of neatly planted vegetables and a chicken run, all very orderly, and then, through another gap, sapphire-colored water, blindingly bright in the sun and with the bluest of blue skies above.

  Three women weeding the vegetable patch straightened as we passed and gave us a hard, bright stare.

  “Do they recognize you, Anto?”

  “I doubt it,” he said, after another stunned pause. “I was hardly shaving when I left.”

  “Anto,” burst from me, “how could you bear it?” Meaning Oxford, grayness, exile. “It’s so, so beautiful.”

  “It is,” he said woodenly, still staring.

  At the end of the drive, two large gold lions glowered from gateposts, their paws resting on shields. Through the gate was an immaculate graveled courtyard, its low walls covered in geranium, hibiscus, and orchids planted in split coconut husks. Beyond the courtyard, a flight of stairs led up to a large, attractive house—far bigger and grander than I’d imagined—with a bright-red pagoda-shaped roof and deep, cool-looking verandas. The whole house was framed by exuberant tropical trees, and above it, that dazzlingly blue sky, so bright it hurt your eyes to look at it.

  The horse stopped. I could hardly breathe I was so nervous. A woman in a soft white garment was standing on the veranda, looking down at us. Her hand was over her mouth as if to stop herself screaming.

  “Amma,” Anto murmured. “Amma.”

  She walked down the steps and broke into a stumbling run. I heard the muffled sob as she stretched out her arms, a long string of words that Anto answered in the same unknown language. I badly wanted Anto to kiss his mother to match her outpouring of emotion. But he stood there, stiff as a post, while she hugged him. And I wished, for his sake, I was invisible.

  When Anto at last put his arms around her, I saw her shudder. He patted her back awkwardly. He glanced at me, his worried look conveying shock, not pleasure.

  “Amma,” he said, releasing her, “I’d like you to meet my wife, Kit. She thinks this place is lovely.”

  “I do.” I smiled and put my hand out. “It’s good to meet you at last, and then, absurdly, I said, “Thank you for having us,” and thought, Oh no! Not us. This is his home.

  Mrs. Thekkeden, who was tall for an Indian woman, seemed to grow then. I watched her shoulders go down, her neck lengthen. She tidied the tears away with a quick, deft gesture. Now I could see she had the same fine cinnamon-colored skin as Anto, the same aristocratic nose. She held out a gracious hand.

  “Welcome to Mangalath.” Her smile was tense, automatic. “Are you very tired?”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” I felt the need to reassure her. “Not at all.”

  “My husband can’t be here today to meet you,” she said to me. “He is involved in a big court case in Trivandrum. You don’t mind?” A quick anxious look at Anto.

  “Of course not,” he said. “Work is work.”

  “To him, yes,” she said with a quick hostessy smile. “So, Kit, I must show you our house.” She turned to Anto. “I’ve decided to put you in the guest room. The others are coming later. We don’t want to bury Kit under a mountain of relatives.”

  The exact same words Anto had used earlier. She smiled at me again, but her eyes feasted hungrily on Anto as we followed her through the veranda and into an elegant reception room. Inside this room, with its high white ceilings and dark, heavily carved rosewood furniture, photographs of elaborately framed Thekkedens glowered down at us from the walls: serious-looking people with dark eyes and thick hair in dark suits and wing collars, and occasionally in their own costumes. We were walking through them when I heard Anto make a sucking sound and then breathe heavily as if he needed to sob or shout.

  “What a beautiful house,” I said, to cover this raw moment.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Thekkeden in a disembodied voice. Her whole body was angled towards Anto, and then she hugged him hard, and said more words in Malayalam that I didn’t understand.

  “Tell Kit about the house.” Anto disentangled himself. “She probably imagined us living in a mud hut.”

  “Anto! No!” I protested, although I was surprised at how posh the house was.

  “What does she want to know?” she asked Anto, and then continued like a polite tour guide. “So, the house and the farm have been in our family for many generations. We have our own granary, where we store rice; our own tennis court; a cricket pitch; a schoolroom where the children were educated . . . I’ll tell her more later,” she finished,
a faint note of impatience in her voice. “I can’t think . . .”

  An old man, wiry and short on teeth, burst through the door carrying our luggage. When he saw Anto, he put his palms together and bowed low and babbled.

  “His name is Pathrose,” Mrs. Thekkeden explained, with tears in her eyes too. “He is saying, ‘Kochu muthalay vannallo,’ the young master has come. He’s worked for us since Anto was a little boy; now he thanks God that he has seen him again before he dies.”

  A slender barefoot boy came next, staggering under the weight of my suitcase. “Kuttan is Pathrose’s grandson. He will show you to your bedroom,” she added.

  “Thank you,” I said demurely: the mention of the bedroom made me feel oddly shy, as if my new mother-in-law had somehow managed to see us in all our nakedness and abandon.

  “May I ask what you would like me to call you?” I asked. “Is there a special name?”

  “Actually, you must call me Amma too. It means Mother,” Mrs. Thekkeden said evenly. It sounded more like an order than an invitation to intimacy. “That’s what I am to you now.”

  We looked at each other. “Yes. Good,” I said, feeling my smile as a shy grimace. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  “When we were little, we called this the bridal suite.”

  Anto stood at the door of our bedroom, still sounding in a mild state of shock. It was a large, whitewashed room, sparsely furnished except for a superb wooden bed carved with fruit and birds, placed center stage and made up with a white sheet and thin-looking pillows. There was an old-fashioned wooden fan clanking overhead, but the air felt moist and heavy. The wooden shutters were closed, which gave me a feeling of claustrophobia.

  “I’ve never slept here before,” he added.