the Communists? Father said you even had a membership card. Here things are the same. It’s you who changed … Eat now, I will ask Pappenchettan to buy fish from tomorrow.’
‘I can’t eat much, but it’s something I remember of our childhood. With tamarind?’
‘Yes.’
He slept the whole afternoon, and is body rested against the golden reed mat preserved from his mother’s time. The edges were frayed, but the softness was wonderful. He felt as if he were sleeping on fresh-smelling hay, and when he awoke it was dark and raining outside. Annama had lit the lamps, for the lights had gone, snapped by the storm. The fat brown beetles he remembered from his childhood were buzzing around the flames.
He went out onto the porch. His feet were bare and he could feel the gravel brought in from some ancient riverbed. Each stone was small and round, smooth, and yet harsh at the same time under his feet.
He walked down to the canal where the tributaries of rivers moved around the town like silver coiled snakes.
The lights of the street shone on the water and he stopped to light a beedi.
‘Ah! Ivan, is it you?’ It was his cousin.
‘Yes, I came this morning. How is Eliyamma?’
‘In good health. Let us walk together. I heard you were sick. Cancer. Is it true? You look much the same.’
‘Three months, they said.’
‘Well, we all have to go. When they put the earth on you, how will you care?’
‘Is there any room in the cemetery? I heard you could not buy land anymore.’
‘Oh, be buried with your father.’
‘No, we never got on. You know I hated him.’
‘That’s why you still talk to me. Those three fingers I took off him. I still dream about it. They lay in the corner of the field for quite some time. And it was all about a square of land smaller than a kerchief.’
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘Will I see you in church tomorrow?’
‘No, I hate the old priest. Why can’t he throw off his long beard, those black robes. Is he closer to Christ because of them?’
‘Still the same Ivan. Drink from the holy cup. Your disease will go.’
‘My father drank from it every Sunday and his fingers never grew.’
‘All right then. Tell Annama that I will send the man to fell the coconuts tomorrow.’
Ivan watched Thomas as he moved away into the darkness of the narrow lane. He was still burly at sixty-five, his legs showed the clear blue network of veins as he strode with his mundu hitched above his knees. His teeth, though betel-stained, were strong. There was something coarse about him, a little brutal, and yet his features, typical of all of them – hooked nose and broad brow – still had the old grace. Thoma had wanted to marry Ivan’s sister, but the old man their father, had thrashed him with a walking stick. Thoma was seventeen years old then – not likely to forget that thrashing.
Annama had told Ivan about it, many years later. She too had not married. Their father had died, and their mother wanted Anna at home with her. Ivan had tried to persuade Anna that she should allow him to arrange a marriage for her – some widower perhaps who would not object to her age. It was then that she told him the story of Father’s anger.
‘He shouted all day and all night. He ate nothing. He flung food off the table. Poured buckets of water on our beds so that we could not sleep. He would say again and again, ‘Filthy, filthy! Seven generations must pass before blood can be shared again. If he looks at you once more. I will finish him.’ I can’t forget Father saying all this. It was a sin to love Thoma. I could not commit it. But I cannot marry anyone, then.’
So the thrashing had taken place, and its retaliation. Annama never spoke to Thoma, but nevertheless he showed his love in many small ways. She never refused him, but it was understood that Jesus would judge them, and the silence between them was understood by their larger family. Ivan was sick of all that.
He would bang his fists on the table and shout.
‘Not Jesus. What do you mean, “Jesus is coming”. It’s the bomb … the bomb will come.’
‘Jesus will come. It says so in Revelation. Your Bible is still here. I’ll get it for you.’
He could see his Bible, childhood’s text – yellow, paper crackling, backbone frayed, faded leaves and flowers of a long gone summer still keeping place.
‘Annama, the disease will wipe me out, the bomb will wipe out the earth. Where is Jesus in all this? I’ve got a translation of Orwell’s 1984. Here, take it.’
‘Jesus will be there. I believe. The sheep will be separated from the goats.’
‘You be the sheep and I the goat?’
‘No, Ivan, you are a good man. You will not be sent away.’
‘Don’t forget, I want the cheapest coffin, and no lining. Mango wood will do, and no cross.’
‘Ivan, you will go as befits the status of Kochumathu’s son.’
There was no arguing with her. He would get up from the table. The pain beginning to sear him again had become a blinding preoccupation, an obsession, a desire for calm that would never be satisfied. In some strange way all that remained of his days in this old house in the ancestors’ village, were the memories of childhood overlapping with the pain that engulfed everything.
When the end came it was early in the morning. He saw the sun rise, and felt the air cool on his body. The trees were dark and soft with rain. The earth would be wet. He had a sudden longing to walk barefoot to the canal, and to look into the water for one last time. He heard Annama moving around – shuddering into wakefulness. He saw the purple orchids, the large white spider lilies, heard the fluttering of pigeons. And that was all.
When Chako came to live in a small village in the hills of North Malabar, the people took to him at once. He was a tall man, thin, a little stooped, and his beard was so long it touched his chest. That was unusual in that area, where men were clean shaven. He found a place to stay in a household which consisted of a man called George, and his little daughter Anna. Chedathi, an old woman living in the outskirts of the village, could come to cook for them and wash clothes. The house was never dusted; it was always dark, littered with clothes, Anna’s books and papers, many stray cats and George Saar’s leather-covered account books. Strangely enough, there were no flies.
George Saar had never known Chako before, but while climbing down the slope from the church, where he spent every evening doing the accounts, he heard a slither behind him. Chako in his clean white mundu, hitched above his knees, umbrella under his arm, had slipped over some red gravel.
‘What is it, missed your step?’
‘I
