Monsoon Summer Read online

  “Obviously,” I said, and squeezed his arm, but he was in no mood for joking. “Where was your room?”

  “Over there.” He opened the shutter across the courtyard. “Next to Amma’s.” He stared at it.

  “She’s so happy to see you,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind about your father—not being here, I mean?”

  “No.” And then, “It was always like that. He was either in court or away on cases. I don’t mind.”

  Sunlight fell in dazzling strips through the shutter. We sat side by side on the bed. “So,” Anto said, “I’m home. Prodigal son returns.” He put his hand under my hair and turned my face towards him. “With prodigal wife,” he said, gazing at me. “And a cast of thousands coming soon,” he went on. His voice—or was I imagining this?—had become more Indian already, that buttery thread running through it.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting them.” A complete lie. I was tired and overwhelmed and felt childishly close to tears. I saw the family as a test I was bound to fail. I said, “Anto, when they come, go down on your own first. I’m sure they’d prefer that.”

  “Do you mind?” His whole expression brightened.

  “Not a bit. Honestly.”

  “Sure you don’t?” He hugged me properly for the first time that day.

  “No, really, just don’t leave me for hours like the princess in the tower.”

  “I won’t,” he said. I hoped he’d kiss me.

  Instead, he showed me the bathroom so I could wash while he was away. This odd-looking room had a large copper cauldron of cool water in the corner for the bath. Above the bath there was a shelf holding a bundle of twigs, and what Anto said were ayurvedic oils for hair and skin. Thin towels that didn’t look like towels, just strips of cotton, hung on hooks on the wall.

  “Be careful with water here—we’re often short in summer—and don’t drink it. I’ll bring boiled water up later.” The lavatory, he said, was a short walk outside the house, next to the chicken run. He could show me now if I liked. Later, I said, paralyzed with shyness at the thought of going downstairs.

  He went to the bathroom to wash his face, and when he came out, his hair still damp, I lay on the bed and watched him change. He took off his shirt, dusty brogues, dark London trousers, and folded them neatly. When he laid them in a pile on the chair, the empty garments fluttered like ghosts under the fan. Naked apart from his underwear, he went to the rosewood wardrobe and took out a white shirt and a strip of white cloth with a gold border.

  “Home clothes.” He glanced at me shyly. “This is the Cochin version of the dhoti . . . Well, this feels strange,” he murmured. He wrapped the white cotton around his waist like a sarong. “Most peculiar.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or moved to be wearing again the clothes he’d grown up in. All I knew was that Anto, bare-legged, half-naked, had in one startling moment become an Indian husband.

  “How do I look?” he said.

  “Strange,” I said. I didn’t know what to think. I ran my hand down his spine, wrapped my arms around him. His back made a drum of my voice. “You smell different. What is it?”

  “Coconut oil, from our own trees. There’s some in the bathroom. You can use it too on your skin and on your hair.”

  “Um.” I clung to him: my anchor in a shifting world.

  “That’s enough of that, woman,” he said, disentangling me. “They’re waiting for me downstairs. I’ll come up and get you before lunch.”

  I’d expected him to say in half an hour, an hour at the most.

  When he was gone, I put on my nightdress, and with nothing to do, lay down on the bed and slept, wishing in a way I could sleep forever, astounded at my own naivety at not thinking this through.

  A few hours later, at the sound of a car horn, I leapt to my feet and, through a slit in the bamboo blinds, watched my new family arrive. A group of women stepped out of the car. They were dressed in dazzling clothes in every color of the rainbow: cerise, emerald, ocher, gold. They were chattering like jays, jiggling up and down on the spot as if they could barely contain themselves. They love him, I thought with a childish kink in my heart: my Anto. I’m not the only one.

  I watched him walk his easy athletic walk towards them and stand between the two gold lions at the entrance. The sight of my husband in a mundu would take some adjusting to, but Anto at least had good legs: long and well muscled, not spindly like Gandhi’s, but I decided not to tell him that. The old jokes wouldn’t work here.

  A youngish woman in a peach-colored sari detached herself from the crowd and ran towards him. She put her head on his shoulder and then sobbed, wiping her eyes with the corner of her stole.

  Mariamma, I thought. The clever older sister.

  Next, a plump old lady—the grandma?—waddled through the courtyard: mouth half-open, gait eager, a little off-center. Ponnamma, Anto had warned me, was Amma’s mother—a little doolally, spoke her mind. He’d warned me in the same breath that some members of the family abbreviated her name to Ponnae but until I knew her better, this would be disrespectful.

  Three children exploded from the car next, skipping across the courtyard, followed by a young woman in a pale-lilac sari who hung back and looked uncertain.

  I’ve no idea who any of you are, I thought; there were only so many family members you could keep in your head at once. The old lady stood in front of Anto. She patted his face like a blind person reading braille, and when her face crumpled, Amma gave her a handkerchief. And watching these tender scenes, my stomach began to knot and coil. In England, Anto had reduced his family to a few colorful or touching anecdotes—his grandma’s startling outspokenness, Mariamma’s bossiness when young. Sometimes, when I was slow to eat, he’d assumed a high falsetto mimicking Amma’s admonitions to take a hanky or finish rice. Now that they were real and about to inspect me, I shrank behind the half-opened blind, my heart thumping as I listened to their voices rise and fall, swell into gunshot exclamations. And over this happy commotion came, suddenly, the clear sound of Anto laughing uninhibitedly too. I’d heard him laugh before, at silly films, at jokes, but this had a new clear and childish note to it.

  The gargling sound of their conversation grew louder as they moved towards the veranda. And then, like a shoal of fish, they all stopped, turned, and looked up together, towards our window. I dropped the blind and blushed a fiery red.

  Anto was mouthing indistinct words; he waved at me in an encouraging way. “Come on down, come on,” he shouted up, and I wanted to kill him.

  Come and get me, I thought. Don’t make me do this on my own.

  I’ve had years of this with my mother, I thought fuming, my cheeks still scarlet. Standing on the outside, marveling at families you would never be part of. I’d hoped that marriage would mean never feeling like this again, which was obviously absurd. And then I disliked myself intensely.

  “Shut up, Kit,” I told myself brutally. “You wanted this.”

  In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror and Matron Smythe, the most feared matron at Saint Andrew’s, came back to me. Brush your hair, girl. Straighten that dress. Smile!

  “Grow up.” I said it out loud. I was ready for my inspection.

  * * *

  As I walked into the dining room trying to smile, twenty-four pairs of Thekkeden eyes swiveled towards me. En masse, they were an exceptionally handsome family: fine dark eyes, soft brown skins, their high-cheekboned faces a fine blending of East and West, well dressed, cultivated. All of them examining me now with a frank but not unfriendly curiosity.

  They were sitting comfortably around a fourteen-foot-long rosewood table. I had been told (in bed, in Oxfordshire) about this table by Anto. He said it had been made from wood salvaged from the deck of a splendid ship that the family had owned when their great-great-grandfather was one of the principal
spice traders on the Malabar Coast, taking coriander and green and red peppers to Africa, to Northern India, to China. The table was set with copper cups, jugs of water, and no visible plates; in front of each chair there was a green banana leaf.

  Anto saw me hovering at the door. He jumped up. “Kit,” he said, “sorry I’ve been—everybody . . . . Shush, shush shush shush,” for the old woman had just boomed, “Is that her?”

  “This is Kit. My new wife.”

  The family greeted me with beaming smiles and perfect politeness. When the fuss had died down, his mother, waiting tensely by the kitchen door, raised her hand and two servants arrived carrying dishes filled to the brim with chicken curries and ginger-scented prawns, elegantly spiced rice, fish molee, the creamy, coconutty curry, and lentil dishes, each one giving off its own tantalizing aroma.

  “All Anto’s favorites,” said his mother. Anto was seated at the head of the table. My place beside him was the only one set with a bone china plate edged in gold, a crystal glass, and a knife, fork, and spoon.

  “You must say grace, Anto,” Amma said, a deep emotional throb to her voice. “You’re the head of the family today.”

  When the old woman said loudly, “Where is Mathu?” Amma put a reproving finger against her mouth. “Say it, Anto,” she insisted. “Go on.”

  Anto glanced at me. “Well . . .” He blinked and closed his eyes. “For these and all thy gifts, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen,” he mumbled.

  “And bless you, God, for bringing back Anto,” Amma said. “Kit too,” she added politely. She pronounced my name Keet to rhyme with meat. “And now,”—she looked at me, smile wobbling only slightly—“it’s time to introduce you properly to your new family. Not everyone of course: Anto has one hundred and ten cousins,” she said with evident pride. “So we had to tell some people to stay home today, which was a bit awkward. All my husband’s family and mine grew up together. From childhood.”

  “Thresiamma is sulking badly,” boomed the old girl, and everyone laughed. “Amma’s in the doghouse.”

  “We couldn’t have everyone,” Amma snapped, throwing a dark look.

  “It wasn’t possible,” Anto said consolingly. “We can stay with the others later, can’t we, Kit? This looks wonderful, Amma.”

  He helped me to some of the food. “Try this, Kit, it’s called meen molee. The best fish curry you will ever eat.” He smelled it ecstatically. “It’s all cream and coconut, and this is a roast pork dish, and vegetables, and pickles, and rice and buttermilk—I’ll tell you all the different names later. All my favorite things,” he told Amma, who was so overwhelmed with emotion she couldn’t speak.

  “She’s been cooking for days,” Ponnamma yelled. “Nothing better than feeding your children.”

  I must learn to cook for him too, I thought. I could barely boil an egg; we’d joked about it before, but now it didn’t seem so funny.

  When the pickles, the rice, and the appam—the lacy coconut pancakes—had been passed around, it surprised me to see these exquisitely dressed people eating with their hands.

  “You must teach me to do that,” I said in a low voice to Anto. I meant later, but he had already taken the fork out of my hand and put a thick green banana leaf in front of me.

  “Here.” He squeezed my right hand into a pouch.

  “Your right hand is your eating hand, so put your elbow on the table. It will give you a firm plank,” he instructed. “Now use your fingers to compact the rice, and use your thumb to push it into your mouth.”

  “I’m undoing twenty-eight years of her mother’s teaching,” he joked with Mariamma.

  “She is twenty-eight! Old!” roared Ponnamma. “I was married at fourteen,” she confided to me, and then, “Your left hand is to wipe botty with, so don’t use.”

  I saw Amma flush with anger and wondered if it was Ponnamma or the spectacle of her son teaching his wife to eat that had made her cross.

  “And make your rice into a neat tight pile like this,” Anto closed his hand over mine. “And put it in your mouth. It tastes better like this. Add in a little of lentils, a piece of chicken, and there,” he smiled at me. “Try it now for yourself.”

  I put my hand into the bright sauces and the sticky rice, and immediately thought of my three-year-old self holding out food-splattered hands to my fastidious mother and saying “dirty” in tones of deep disgust.

  “Like this?” The whole table watched, fascinated, as I left a blob of bright sauce on my blouse, half a handful of rice on my new skirt. Halfway through this mortifying spectacle, Anto got up and washed his hands in a sink in the corner of the room. On his way back, he looked at me and said something in Malayalam which made the family rock with laughter.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “We’re not laughing at you,” he added at last, breathlessly. “I promise.”

  I believed him. He was too kind to mock me in a situation like this, and besides, I liked seeing him laugh and dab his eyes, the sharp planes of his face relaxing.

  “You’ll get the hang of it soon.” Mariamma, my new sister-in-law, had placed her plump, sweet-smelling body beside me. She picked some grains of rice from my lap and told me in faultless English that she was so happy to meet someone from England, she was a great fan of English literature: “George Eliot is my particular favorite, and Mr. George Orwell speaks to us particularly since Independence.”

  At the mention of the I-word, several heads were raised and looked in my direction. Over lunch no one had said a single sausage about Independence or the British or the war or the massacres up north, and though I’d been bracing myself for this conversational cliff, I’d been grateful for their tact. But when Amma came back from the kitchen, I took the plunge.

  “Anto was sorry to miss Independence,” I said. “It must have been a tremendous moment.”

  “It was,” Amma said with a quelling look. “Let’s talk about that later. Did he seem homesick in England?” she said, her eyes very bright, very hurt.

  “He was brave,” I said after a confusing pause. “He must have missed you so much, but he was never self-pitying about it. He simply put his head down and worked.”

  “He had no choice.” Amma gave me a level look. “Did he?” She ate in silence for a while and then continued, “He broke many hearts while he was away.”

  I felt a surge of panic at these words. If I’d known her better, I might have asked, “Do you mean here or in England?” But I was dimly aware that these were the dangerous spaces between us, so I kept my mouth shut and she went back to the kitchen.

  * * *

  Later, over coffee on the veranda, twenty or so of us sat around a mother-of-pearl–inlaid table. Anto gave me sliced pineapple and then plucked a few leaves from the saucer beside them.

  “These are betel leaves,” he said, “good for digestion and palate cleansing.” He opened the small brass pot beside them. “Take a bit of this lime, smear it on the leaves, put some chopped betel leaf on it, pop into your mouth, and chew—nicer than a Mars bar,” he assured me. I chewed away dutifully (horrible taste) thinking, Wonderful! Thank you, Anto: bright-red teeth to add to the humiliation.

  When everyone’s cup was poured, the granny said, “So, what I am waiting to hear is how the two lovebirds met.”

  “Nosy.” Mariamma gave her a reproving tap on the shoulder as the table fell expectantly silent, and one or two people were shushed. I saw Anto’s head jerk up, and my mind leapt to the first night we’d made love. The speed with which we’d ripped off each other’s clothes felt positively indecent in this setting, and because Anto had never once mentioned it again, not even to me, I’d sometimes worried that he’d found my behavior worryingly fast. I didn’t understand it myself. My body had decided, and morals had lumbered on behind.

  “Well . . .” Anto crossed his legs.

 
; “It was very romantic, I’m thinking. Was it?” The old woman prompted, head on one side, her eyes twinkling coyly. “A love match maybe. Come on, young lady, how did you meet this themmadi?” The table notably sucked its breath in but nobody stopped her.

  “Bad Granny.” Mariamma smacked her hand softly, but her eyes gleamed with curiosity too. “Themmadi means rascal,” she translated helpfully.

  “Well, why else would he bring her all this way?” the old lady protested boisterously.

  “Actually, it was not romantic at all,” said Anto. “It was terrifying.”

  “Terrifying?” Amma’s eyebrows rose.

  “Yes, terrifying. I didn’t tell you this before, but we were together in Saint Thomas’ Hospital on the night it was bombed. Actually, it was bombed several times; the first time, fourteen people died.”

  “Oh, dear Lord.” Amma crossed herself and her hand flew to her face.

  “This time, not so bad,” Anto said. “The roof fell in, there was a lot of shouting and running and I met Kit. We were both covered in soot, so she had no idea I was Indian.”

  No one laughed at his little joke.

  “And why were you there?” Amma asked Kit. “Were you ill?” I took a deep breath. All of this was the truth, but a strange version of it: the fact was, he’d told me once he’d been seconded to Thomas’ that night, but I had absolutely no memory of meeting him then, and we’d never discussed the coincidence, not even with Daisy. My memory seemed to have blanked out that awful time, and I hated talking about it, mainly because of what had happened next. Now when I looked at Anto, he shrugged and nodded as if to say, Go on.

  “I was a nurse. I am a nurse.”

  “A nurse.” A dribble of red betel juice ran out of the old woman’s mouth. She grimaced at the others in an unguarded way.

  Daisy had warned me in advance that it would be best to call myself “a medical researcher” or some such, until I got to know the family better. Nurses, she’d said, were considered a low form of female life in India. When I’d protested that Anto’s family were well-educated Catholics, from the more progressive South India, she’d said simply, “Trust me, darling, no woman in their family will ever have been a nurse.”