eaten? We’ve made three kinds of fish for you. It’s so wonderful you’ve come back. We must find a boy for you … Your father’s left you enough money, thank God!’
‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I have to get some books from the house in Delhi, and then I’ll go back to America.’
‘You’re leaving tomorrow? But you’ve just arrived. You always lacked common sense. That’s why it’s so difficult to get you married off. Benjy was such a good man. He would have looked after you well. But what’s the use. A boy needs someone who can cook and clean, not someone who reads all the time.’
‘I’m thirty, I don’t need a boy. I have to go. I must go. I find the rain oppressive. My books are already damp, by tomorrow the gum holding them will have gone completely.’ I was almost weeping.
‘Rain, oppressive? But without rain things don’t grow. It’s true that there is no fish, in the rains the fish just disappear. Where do all the fish in the sea go? Ouseph says that it’s dangerous to fish. I’ve never been near the sea, so I won’t know. Eli, we were lucky today. We made three kinds of fish for you. Go and eat, you’re tired.’
‘I hate fish,’ I said stonily.
‘You’re just like your father. He was my favourite. Your uncle is not at all like him. I really had to talk your grandfather into giving your father that chunk of properly. Your uncle is still mad with me. And your grandfather kept saying, “But he’s a teacher. What’ll he do with money? He doesn’t know how to invest.” Anyway, you’re taken care of. But one thing, Eli, if another year goes by, no one will marry you. Oil your hair at least, it’s gone copper.’
‘I don’t want to marry, I want to study.’
‘But you’re thirty. How can you keep studying? Anyway, go and eat. I’m tired.’
She put her beautiful silver head on the pillow, and her creased soft face looked tired.
‘Come and see me before you go. I’ll give you a bottle of Kashayam. It’s made of gooseberries I cured ten years ago. It will make your blood flow.’
‘I wouldn’t touch it. The last concoction you gave me made my head swim.’ I bent to kiss her.
‘Thin-blooded, that’s why,’ she said, blessing me, with her dry papery old hands on my head and my cheeks.
I went out into the bright monsoon sunlight. After the rain, because the atmosphere is clean, the light is always strong.
Centipedes crawled out from beneath stones and locked in coitus. They looked like they would multiply at great speed and take over the land.
I looked at my thin flat stomach covered by my olive shirt. Would I have children? Was it important? Would I love a man again, and keep a house, and forget the eternity of waiting that I had just passed? I went in to eat my three kinds of fish for lunch.
The mango trees were in bloom as he came home that summer. They splayed out over the roof of the house, and he knew that later, as it grew hotter, the fruit would hang green and heavy, and then become golden in the chests of dark teakwood.
His sister opened the door. When he looked at her he knew that the summers had passed without their knowing. His first remembrances were of her as a child – thin, with slanting black eyes, like all the women in his father’s family: the many aunts who had dominated his childhood. Her face had a strange beauty, translucent almost, but she did not smile at him.
‘What’s happened to you,’ she said. ‘You look sick.’
‘Came home to die, didn’t I tell you that. You never reply to any of my letters.’
She said nothing but took him into the large dark rooms of their ancient home. The taravat, as his mother called it, always reminded him of the long Biblical genealogies his father had made him read by candlelight. How tedious it had seemed, this preoccupation with ancestry, with sonhood, with naming. He was glad he had no property to congeal in inheritance, no child to take over the preoccupation of being an ‘old line’. Under this roof Ivan begat Yohan and Yohan begat John, and John begat Yohan and Yohan begat Yohanan, century after century with deliberate certainty. He thought of his sister, and the silence that followed her birth. At that very moment, when no bells clanged, and no sweets were made with jaggery and rice, he had resolved to end this torment of patrilineality once and for all. He would not marry.
At work his friends used to ask him, ‘How can you have such a name, “Ivan”?’
‘Ivan is my father’s name, Malayalam for John – may be Syrian, or Greek, who knows? – our ancestors were baptised by St Thomas, the disciple of Christ, and so we have the names of Jesus’ friends and followers.’
‘What is the unpronounceable name you hide in the initial V?’
He would say, ‘Vazhayil – the name of our house,’ and his terseness always surprised them.
He never wanted to share Vazhayil with anyone. The dark cool interiors filled often enough the labyrinths of his own memory. He remembered, too, with a certain detachment his father’s hands with their three fingers missing – chopped off by a neighbour’s kitchen knife in a mango orchard. The neighbour was his father’s brother’s son, Thoma. They still talked to one another, now that his father was dead, and curiously Ivan bore no grudge.
He put his bags on the bed, and listened for a moment to the creaking – a circular creaking – and asked what it was.
‘It’s the fan,’ said his sister from the kitchen. ‘Don’t you remember? Father had it put in in 1937.’
He looked up and saw it dangerously veering in a circular motion. Its flat blades were painted cream and black wires threaded across a wooden ceiling. A naked light bulb hung dangerously close, swinging in vicarious motion. Outside the crows were calling out near the kitchen. It was still morning.
‘How was the journey?’
‘It was hot, but it rained once. I couldn’t eat anything.’
At the table, as she put out the food for him, he looked at her closely. Her face was deeply lined, and on her hands the veins stood out, deep and thick and blue, like the outlines of bare trees. She poured out his tea. Why was it so thick, he wondered, like some viscous soup.
‘I made it just the way you like it,’ she said, stirring the tea leaves continuously.
He did not reply.
‘It’s Lent, isn’t it?’ he said, looking at what she had cooked, for there was no meat or fish.
‘For me, it’s always Lent.’
‘Oh God, no.’
‘I’ll cook for you if you like, but you will have to pay. You know my finances, I can hardly manage.’
‘Is that why you don’t eat, then?’
‘No, I like to keep the fasts. Now for me, every day is holy and every day I take the Eucharist.’
‘You
