style="font-size:15px;"> Job asked, turning back to look at me, ‘What on earth is the Gundert? And I must buy you a box. You have a tin trunk? I didn’t even know they still existed.’
‘It’s a dictionary. The Gundert is an English–Malayalam dictionary. Father George is afraid I’ll forget to read and write the mother tongue.’
‘Write every week. Don’t forget the algebra,’ the old man shouted once more.
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Meet Father Agnello. A Catholic, but a good man. Holy.’
It started to rain. I saw Yohan. He was looking at Mariam and smiling. He looked towards me and waved. The taxi began to move, and then through a blur of tears, I saw Yohan open out a large black umbrella and Mariam stood close against him.
Marcella was wonderful. She was older than Job, and the love between them was so tangible I was forever surprised by it. Job stopped speaking Malayalam to me, and I was forced to learn Italian. My English was very good, because Father George had a degree in literature, in philosophy and in theology from Cambridge. He had been our parish priest for twenty years – unusual for our sect where priests were constantly transferred. It was he who had educated me, and by the time I was sixteen I had read almost everything that he had. The Russians were indecipherable to me, and Father said that I would have to wait till I was thirty before I could begin. I sometimes told Yohan what I read and he would look strangely at me. His eyes were narrow and black, and his cheekbones so sharp that they jutted through his skin.
‘You don’t even know how to cook.’
‘Shall I translate Aristotle’s Politics for you?’
‘That’s all very well. You had better marry soon, Anna. You have charm, but no beauty. Your father died too early. You can’t even cook or sew. You’re thin like your mother – she almost died when she gave birth to you.’
‘Yohan, why are you saying all this?’
‘I’m worried about you. And you should stop coming to see me. I’ll talk to Father about finding a match for you.’
How long ago all that seemed here in Rome. I realised as the years passed that love threatened us both. I understood, sitting under another kind of sun, why Yohan no longer acknowledged me.
Marcella never talked to me of marriage. She bought me an expensive camera almost as soon as I arrived.
‘We can’t afford to send you to the University. We want you to have the best, but university – no. We cannot afford. You’re too late to sculpt. The camera is good, you learn and sell. That is how you will live.’
So my future was carved out, and I spent those early months walking miles every day, in the cold breeze and the spring rain, learning to use a camera. My early photographs – now with Father George – were mainly of fountains and plazas, colonnades and arches. Marcella was not pleased.
‘Stupid tourist bitch,’ I heard her screaming to Job.
‘Marcella, she’s a child, from the country. Don’t speak like that.’
‘Let her hear what I think.’
Two years later I did a study of the Colosseum. The earth was deeply stenched with rain, weeds grew. I sent them to a German magazine which printed them at once. Celebration! Marcella was pleased at last. She gave me one of her odd, rare and brilliant smiles.
I wanted to go back home, but Job dissuaded me.
‘Things will not be the same. Ammachi is dead, what is there to go for?’
‘Yohan is there, and Leelamma.’
‘Yohan? That silent boy, Abe’s son? You want to see him?’
‘I want to hear the rain, I want to eat mangoes, sit by the river.’
‘You’re a fool. Nothing is the same ever. Ask Marcella for money if you want to go. I have none now.’
So I never went back. Sometimes in the dark green Roman street, ancient cobbles under my feet. I would think of the old house where I grew up. There were children, frogs, spiders, crows in the backyard, dark recesses, mangoes ripening in hay, and hens laying eggs in a chest of rice. I missed the high pitched Syrian chants from the village church, and the white cotton clothes edged with gold metallic thread that our women wore. One day I would go back to my ancient village where the wind brought to us the sound of the sea, and the hush of river water.
It was the dry bare-bones of a long summer. I walked in the dust, with the hot winds blowing around me, paper scrapping in the alleys, the city deserted in the glare of the afternoon sun. I walked to the old fort. It was green and cool, the grass growing wild, the moat a little murky, but glistening silver where it escaped the shadows of old mortar. I heard the strange guttural calls of water birds, and the summer became at once another. I was seventeen then. The memory became an incandescent bubble in which I lay, slothful.
I don’t know how long I had been lying in the shadows of the old peepal. Vulture droppings had made the tree alien, and I sensed the death in the old tree – its gnarled roots were exposed like the knees of crones, and its scabby trunk veered upward. A million tiny ants crawled out of a hole and marched in single file around and around its base.
I knew it was madness to stay, but the tentacles of time caught me – the fort so old and unknown, spoke to me in a hundred ways. It was dusk when I arose and saw to my surprise that I was not alone. The man was tall, with the narrow brown eyes that I had known once before, both laughter and arrogance in them. He was older by twenty years, and I felt a deep sense of dread.
‘So you still come here.’
‘Yes, sometimes – when it gets too hot.’
He pointed at the steps where we had sat, those long years ago in our childhood.
‘Do you remember the flies? They used to circle us,’ he said.
‘Kings and horses, I remember, but not the flies,’ I laughed, looking at him, forgetting the years in between.
We had sat on the steps many times with our hands locked together, afraid to make love because I was too young to ask, and he, old-fashioned, knew we were not destined to marry. I remembered the dreadful intensity of our eyes as they looked into each others’, the world sailing past, and yet beyond it – a laughter which would redeem us, would allow us to jump down and go walking barefoot over the ancient graves and the jagged ends of broken walls.
‘Why did you go away like that?’ I asked him.
‘You were too young for me. You understood nothing about me.’
‘Are you married now?’
He took out a smooth black wallet, and from it pictures of his large, lovely wife and his perfect children. They were American, all of them. So was he, down to his Reebok shoes and his wine-coloured tie.
‘I missed you,’ I said.
‘You
