The Covenant of Water

1903, Parambil

In the three years since her arrival, she’s transformed the covered breezeway outside the kitchen into her personal space; she has a rope cot here where she and JoJo nap after lunch and where she teaches the five-year-old his letters. It allows her to keep an eye on the pots on the hearth and the paddy drying on mats in the muttam. While JoJo sleeps she sits on the cot, rereading the only printed material in the house: an old issue of the Manorama. She can’t bring herself to throw the paper away. If she does, there’ll be nothing, no words on which her eyes might rest. She’s tired of chastising herself for not bringing a Bible with her to Parambil; instead, she directs her annoyance to JoJo’s mother. It’s unthinkable for a Christian household not to have the Holy Book.

JoJo stirs just as she sees Shamuel returning from the market with the shopping, a sack balanced on his head. He squats before her and empties the sack before folding it away.

Shamuel mops his face with his thorthu, his eyes falling on the newspaper. “What does it say?” he asks, pointing with his chin as he smooths out his thorthu and drapes it over his shoulder.

“Do you think something new crawled in there since the last time I read it to you, Shamuel?”

“Aah, aah,” he says. His graying brows frame eyes that like a child’s cannot conceal his disappointment.

The next week when Shamuel returns from the provision store and empties his sack, he says in his usual manner, “Matches. Two is coconut oil. Three is bitter gourd. Garlic, four. Malayala Manorama—” setting the paper down as though it’s another vegetable. He can barely conceal his delight when she clutches the paper to herself, elated. “Weekly it will come,” he says, proud to have pleased her. She knows that only her husband could have arranged this.

Later that morning, she spots her husband not far from the house, but ten feet off the ground, seated in the fork of a plavu, or jackfruit tree, his back against the trunk and his legs extended along the branch, a toothpick at the corner of his mouth. She’s tempted to wave the newspaper to convey to him how grateful she is. She still marvels at his choosing these lofty perches instead of putting his legs up on the long arms of his charu kasera; his particular chair is striking in size because it is made to his proportions, yet it sits unoccupied on the verandah. She observes him up there; his face in profile is handsome, she thinks. A pulayan below him and out of her sight says something that makes her husband remove the toothpick and grin, showing strong, even teeth. You should smile more often, she thinks. He yawns and stretches, adjusting his position, and her stomach turns cold. A fall from even this modest height would be devastating. Whenever she spots him so high up a distant tree that he’s no more than an eccentric bump marring a smooth trunk she cannot bear to look. Shamuel says that it’s from that vantage point that he reads the land, plans the direction of irrigation ditches or new paddy fields.

In the evenings after she serves dinner and while her husband eats, she reads the Manorama to him. He never picks it up himself. The newspaper brightens her days, but it does nothing for a profound loneliness that she’s ashamed to acknowledge. Thankamma, who had promised to return, writes that her husband has taken ill and is bedridden, so she has put off her visit indefinitely. As for her mother, three monsoons have come and gone and they have yet to see each other! Her mother tells her not to visit. Even if she wanted to, a young woman doesn’t make such a journey alone. JoJo, who clings to her like a bracelet, won’t go near the boat jetty, let alone climb into a boat. She suspects her husband is the same way.

When her formal evening prayers are done, she converses with the Lord. “I’m so happy about the newspaper. My husband clearly cares about my needs. Should I mention the other matter? I don’t mean to complain, but if this is a Christian house, why don’t we go to church? I know you’ve heard this before. If my mother could only come here, I wouldn’t bother you. I could talk it over with her.”

Perhaps in answer to her incessant prayers, at last a letter comes from her mother after long months of silence. Shamuel calls at the church on his way to the mill and this time he comes back excitedly holding the letter with both hands because he knows how precious it is; his excitement is nearly a match for hers.

My darling daughter, my treasure, how it warmed my heart to see your letter. You won’t know how many times I kissed it. Your cousin Biji is getting married. I go to the church every day. I visit your father’s grave and I pray for you. My most precious memories are with him, and then with you. What I am saying is please treasure each day you are in your marriage. To be a wife, to care for a husband, to have children, is there anything more valuable? Keep me in your prayers.

She revisits the letter many times in the ensuing days, kissing it each time like a sacred object. No matter how many times she reads it, it does nothing to diminish her worry. She resists the reality of life: a married woman gives up her childhood home forever, and a widow’s fate is to remain in the home she married into.

The calendar on the wall—a pullout from the newspaper—looks like a mathematical table and astronomy chart. It shows lunar phases, the times each day that are inauspicious for setting out on a journey. Now it tells her this is the start of Lent, the fifty-day fast leading up to Good Friday. She will give up meat, fish, and milk, but on the first day she doesn’t eat even a morsel.

When her husband sits down to dinner that evening she puts the freshly cut banana leaf and the jeera water on the table. He smooths out the leaf. She frames the words she’s rehearsed. Just as she opens her mouth to speak, he flattens the spine of the banana leaf with his fist—Crack! Crack!—startling her. He splashes jeera water on the green mirrored surface, brushing the excess off in the direction of the muttam. The moment is gone. She quietly serves the rice, the pickle, the yogurt . . . then she approaches with the meat, to see if he’ll wave it off on this first day of Lent. But no, he’s impatient for it. What made her think this year would be different from previous years?

In the days that follow, neither meat nor fish crosses her lips; she misses the companionship of a household that is fasting, but her loneliness only strengthens her determination.

“You should eat more,” Shamuel says, halfway through Lent. “You’re getting too thin.” It’s forward of Shamuel to speak this way. “The thamb’ran says so. He’s worried.” She feels like the people on a hunger strike pictured in the paper, camped outside the Secretariat: becoming more diminished in order to be seen.

“If the thamb’ran thinks so, he should tell me.”

That night she puts off prayers and putters around with other things. At last, when she’s sleepy, she covers her head and stands facing the crucifix on the east wall of her bedroom, following tradition, because the Messiah would approach Jerusalem from the east. No prayers, no words will come to her mouth. Does God not feel her disappointment? Eventually she says, “Lord, I’m not going to keep asking. You see the obstacles in my path. If you want me in church, then you must help. That’s all I’ll say. Amen.”

Thankamma had said that the secret to getting what you wanted from your husband was to make a wish as you prepared jackfruit ­halwa. But it isn’t halwa that opens the door, it’s her erechi olarthiyathu. She prepares it in the morning by roasting and then powdering coriander and fennel seeds, pepper, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, and star anise in a mortar and rubbing this dry mix into the cubes of mutton to marinate. In the afternoon she browns onions along with fresh coconut slivers, mustard seeds, ginger, garlic, green chilies, turmeric, and curry leaves and more of the dry spice mix, then adds the meat. She flattens the fire to embers, uncovering the pot so the gravy thickens and covers each cube of meat with a heavy, dark coating. That night, once she sends JoJo to say to his father “choru vilambi”—rice is served—she finishes the dish by refrying the meat in coconut oil with fresh curry leaves and diced coconut. She brings it out sizzling, the oil still spitting on the blackened meat’s surface. Before she’s done ladling it on his banana leaf, he’s popped a piece in his mouth. He can’t resist.

She stands quietly to one side as he eats, but closer than usual. She’s already read the newspaper to him in the past few nights and must await the new edition. God suddenly gives her the nerve to speak.

“Is the meat all right?” she asks. She knows it has never tasted better.

The words have left her mouth like water from the long spout of a kindi and she watches them arrive at the cup of his ears. It’s as though another human being has spoken, not she.

Just when she thinks he’s annoyed at her boldness, the big head sways from side to side, signaling his approval. The surge of pleasure she feels makes her want to clap, to dance. For once, he sits after he finishes, not rising to rinse off his hands from the kindi.

Can he hear the hammering of her heart?

JoJo, who peeks at them from behind a pillar, is astonished to hear her speak to his father. He whispers much too loud, “Ammachi, don’t tell him! Tomorrow I promise I’ll bathe.”

She clamps her hand to her mouth, but not before a giggle escapes.

There’s a terrible pause and then a strange explosion; an impossibly loud and unexpected laugh emanates from her husband. JoJo emerges into the light, puzzled. When he realizes that they are laughing at him, he races up and smacks her on the thigh, crying and furious, running away before she can grab him. This only renews her husband’s guffaws, and he throws himself against the back of his chair. The laughter transforms him, revealing a side of him she has not seen.

He wipes his eyes with his left hand, still smiling.

And words come tumbling out of her mouth. She tells him that when it was time for JoJo’s bath that afternoon, she’d looked everywhere for him, eventually finding him high up in the jackfruit tree, stuck there on the plavu. Her husband’s bright smile is still there. She goes on: JoJo is learning his letters and his numbers, but only if she bribes him with a treat of raw mango dotted with chili powder. She herself prefers the varietal of plantain that Shamuel brought today . . . She hears herself prattling and stops. The crickets fill the void, and now a bullfrog joins the chorus.

Then her husband asks her a question that he might have asked a long, long time ago: “Sughamano?” Is everything good for you? He looks directly at her. It’s the first time he’s studied her so intently since he stood before her in church almost three years ago.

She tries to meet his gaze; in his eyes is a force as powerful as that of the altar in the church where they married. She recalls the line in her wedding service: As Christ is the head of the church so also the husband is the head of the house.

Suddenly she understands why he has kept his distance since the day of their marriage, saying little, but from afar ensuring her needs and comfort; it isn’t indifference but the opposite. He recognizes that he’s someone who can so easily make her fearful.

She drops her gaze. Her ability to speak has flown away. But she’s been asked a question. He’s waiting.

Her legs feel unsteady. She has a strange impulse to go to him, to brush that knotted forearm with her fingers. It’s an urge for affection, for human touch. At home she had daily hugs and kisses, her mother’s body to warm her at night. Here, but for JoJo, she’d wither to nothing.

She hears his chair scrape back because he has given up on a response. She says softly, “I miss my mother.”

He raises his eyebrows, perhaps unsure whether he imagined the sound.

“And it would be nice to go to church,” she says in a voice that is unnaturally loud.

He seems to turn this thought over. Then he rinses his hands with the kindi, steps down to the muttam, and is gone. Her heart contracts. Foolish, foolish to have asked for so much!

Later that night, once JoJo is asleep, she goes back to the kitchen to clean up, and to cover the embers with a coconut husk, allowing them to survive till morning. Then she returns to the room where she sleeps with JoJo, her heart heavy.

She’s startled to see an open metal trunk on the floor. The stack of folded white clothing inside must belong to JoJo’s mother. All she brought with her to Parambil was her wedding chatta and mundu and three extra sets, all the same bright white, the traditional Saint Thomas Christian woman’s garb. She left behind the colorful half-saris and skirts of childhood. Her chattas are tight at the shoulders and they faintly outline her budding breasts, when the formless garment is meant to suggest that there’s nothing there at all. She’d taken to wearing an oversized and threadbare chatta and mundu that Thankamma left behind. The chattas in the trunk, which must belong to JoJo’s mother, fit perfectly. She studies herself in the mirror. Her body is changing; she’s taller and has put on weight. Over a year ago, she bled for the first time. It scared her, even though her mother had warned her it would happen. She brewed ginger tea for the cramping and she fashioned menstrual cloths, calling on her memory of seeing them hanging on the line. When she put her laundered menstrual cloth out to dry, she camouflaged it with towels and linen. For four days she felt ill at ease, so distracted while trying to carry on. There was no one she could commiserate with, or celebrate with, for that matter. Even now, those four or five days are a great trial.

At the very bottom of the trunk, she finds a Bible. You had a Bible all these days and never told me? She’s too excited by this find to be annoyed for very long, but she resolves to mention it the next time she visits the cellar.

When Sunday comes she’s surprised to find her husband in his white juba and mundu—his wedding clothes. She’s so accustomed to seeing him bare-chested, his mundu half hitched, and a thorthu over his left shoulder, indistinguishable from the pulayar who work for him. Only his height and breadth set him apart, a sign that he grew up in a house where there was ample food. He calls out to Shamuel: “Ask Sara to come stay with JoJo till we come back from church.”

She races to get dressed. “Lord, I’ll thank You properly once I’m in Your house.”

They set off over land, heading the opposite direction to the boat jetty. She clutches the Bible, scurrying to keep up, taking two steps for each of his. She’s so excited that her feet barely touch the ground. After a bit they come to the rivulet with its single-log bridge, slippery with moss. “You go first,” he says, and she scampers over. He follows, feet planted carefully, his jaws clenched. Once across, he rests a hand on the burden stone, gathering himself before they head on. Their walk to church is much longer than if they had gone by boat; eventually they cross the river on a bridge wide enough for carts.

The sight of people streaming into church thrills her, though she knows no one. “I’ll be waiting there,” he says, pointing to a spreading peepal with aerial roots hanging down like whiskers over the church’s graveyard. She’s too excited to do anything but go on into the church, pulling her kavani over her head. She’s forgotten what it’s like to see so many at worship, to feel bodies all around, to be part of the fabric instead of a thread torn from the whole.

The men are on the left, women on the right, an imaginary line separating them. She relishes the familiar phrases of the Eucharist. When the achen raises the veil and shivers it in his hands, she feels God’s presence, feels the Holy Spirit wash over her, wave after wave, lifting her off her feet. Joyful tears blur her sight. “I’m here, Lord! I am here!” she cries silently.

When the service is over, she comes outside and spots her husband emerging from the graveyard, his expression brooding. Excited conversation and laughter from the jetty and in the ferryboats reach their ears. They head back in silence.

“It’s five years ago that she died . . .” he says suddenly, his voice laden with emotion.

JoJo’s mother. It’s strange to hear him speak of her with such feeling. Is it envy she feels? Is she hoping that he might speak about her one day with the same passion? She’s silent, fearful that anything she says will stop the flow of words.

“How can you forgive a God,” he says, “who takes a mother from her child?”

The spaces between his sentences feel as wide as a river. This time when they ford the log bridge, he goes first. He waits on the other side, studying his young wife who wears the clothes of his late wife, as though seeing her for the first time.

“I wish she could see us,” he says, standing still. “I wish she could see how well you care for JoJo. How much love he has for you. That would make her happy. I wish she could see that.”

She feels dizzy from the praise, clutching the Bible that once belonged to the woman he just invoked. She is standing close to him and cranes up to see his face, feeling she might topple back.

“I know she can see us,” she says with conviction. She could tell him why, but he doesn’t need explanations, just the truth. “She watches over us in everything. She stays my hand when I want to add more salt. She reminds me when the rice boils over.”

His eyebrows go up and then his face relaxes. He sighs. “JoJo has no memory of his mother.”

“That’s all right,” she says. “With her blessing, I’m his mother now. There’s no need for him to remember or to grieve.”

They haven’t moved. He peers down at her with his intense gaze. She doesn’t flinch. She sees something giving way in him, as though the door to the locked ara, to the fortress of his body, has swung open. His expression turns to one of contentment. The trace of a smile seems to signal the end of a long torment. When he resumes walking, it’s at an easier pace, husband and wife in step.

The following Sunday, he suggests she go alone to church by boat—since he’s not coming, she doesn’t need to make the long walk. He escorts her to the jetty, where a few other women and couples are gathered. As the boatmen pole the boat off the bank, she looks back and sees her husband standing in a cluster of areca nut trees, their narrow, pale trunks a contrast with his thick, dark one. He’s rooted to the ground more firmly than any tree. Not even Damodaran could dislodge him.

Their eyes lock. As the boat pulls away, she registers his expression: sadness and envy. She aches for him, a man who won’t travel by water, who perhaps has never heard the sound of water parting before the prow, never felt the exhilaration of being carried by the current, or the spray as the boatman’s pole clears the water. He’ll never know the bracing sensation of diving headfirst into the river, the roar of entry followed by enveloping silence. All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits of his.

On her sixteenth birthday, she hears a commotion outside the kitchen and the excited voices of children. The ducks clustered around the back steps squawk and struggle to take flight, forgetting their clipped wings. She knows who it is even before she hears the clink of a heavy chain and before she turns to see the ancient eye that somehow peers in through the kitchen window. She laughs. “Damo! How did you know?” This is a new sensation: to gaze at that eye without the distraction of the immense body. She marvels at his tangled eyelashes, the delicately patterned, cinnamon-colored iris. Suddenly she’s gazing into Damo’s soul . . . and he into hers. She feels his love, his concern, just as when he greeted her on her first night as a bride.

“Give me a moment. I have a treat for you.” She’s at a delicate phase in making meen vevichathu. She lowers the seer-fish fillets into the fiery red gravy that simmers in the clay pot. It owes its vibrant color to chili powder, and its muddy consistency to the cooked-down shallots, ginger, and spices. But the key to its signature flavor is kokum, or Malabar tamarind. She must taste it repeatedly, balancing tart with salt, adding kokum water if the curry isn’t sour enough, and removing kokum pieces if it’s too sour.

The impatient giant stamps his foot, shaking dust from the rafters.

“Stop! If my curry turns out badly, I’ll tell the thamb’ran who’s responsible.”

She emerges with a hastily mixed bucket of rice and ghee. Damo’s grin reminds her of JoJo at his naughtiest. Caesar, the pariah dog, dances excitedly but is careful to stay clear of the giant’s feet. Damodaran pinches the lip of the bucket, lifts it from her hands, and inverts its contents into his mouth as if it were a thimble. He sweeps its edge with his tongue, then puts it down and probes with his trunk for anything he has missed.

Unni, perched on Damo’s neck, his bare feet hooked behind the huge ears, looks like a cat stranded up a tree. The mahout’s frown is hard to see on his dark, pockmarked face, but his thick eyebrows are crossing in the middle.

“Look!” Unni says, pointing to the mess on the muttam. “I tried to steer him to his spot by the tree, but no, he had to come by the kitchen first.”

She leans her hand on Damo’s trunk. “He came for my birthday. No one here knows, but somehow he does. God bless you for coming, my Damo.” Suddenly she feels shy—she doesn’t speak to her husband in such loving tones. Damo curls his trunk into a salute.

When she finishes in the kitchen, she goes to Damo at his usual spot by the oldest palm. Unni has chained Damo’s back leg to a stump, but it’s more reminder than restraint. Damo can snap it as easily as a child breaks a twig, and he often does. As usual, every child around Parambil has come running, word having spread that Damo is home. The toddlers wear just the shiny aranjanam around the waist, not the least self-conscious about their nakedness, though wary of Damo as they hide behind the older children. She spots JoJo, one arm around the shoulder of the blacksmith’s son, who is also six years old, but JoJo is a head taller. She stands back observing, as intrigued by the children as by the elephant.

Damo dips his trunk in the bucket of water and sprays his spectators. The little ones scatter, shrieking happily. When they regroup, he does it again.

Damo is fastidious. Unlike a cow or goat, he won’t eat if his excrement is lying around. If Unni wants him to stay in one spot, he must keep shoveling away whatever pushes out of Damodaran’s rear end. It’s a never-ending task for Unni, and endlessly fascinating to the young audience.

“What’s that?” the blacksmith’s daughter says, pointing to the thick, crooked club hanging down from Damo’s belly, its blunt end a mossy green. She’s seven years old. “Is that another trunk?”

“No, silly,” her brother says, speaking with authority despite being a year younger than her. “It’s his Little-Thoma.”

The boys laugh. The toddlers, who don’t understand, laugh loudest of all.

“Ha!” the blacksmith’s daughter says huffily. “It’s not so little then, is it? If you ask me, his trunk looks more like a Little-Thoma than that funny thing.”

There’s a silence as the children consider this question. The brother turns to examine the goldsmith’s two-year-old grandson, a bow-legged, befuddled, and potbellied baby who has one finger in his nostril; all of them now study this little fellow’s uncircumcised, puffy penis that ends in a wrinkled pout; then they compare it to Damodaran’s trunk.

“I suppose it does,” the blacksmith’s boy says.

Damo’s swaying trunk seems to exist independently of its owner, its movements decidedly human. While his forefoot pins down a coconut branch, the pincer tip of Damo’s trunk strips off the leaves in one graceful stroke. He smacks the bundled leaves against the tree to rid them of insects, then folds them onto his lip. As he chews, his trunk swings back down, but then, like a restless, playful schoolboy, he snatches the towel off Unni’s shoulder and waves it like a flag before Unni snatches it back.

“If only my Little-Thoma could do all that his trunk does,” she overhears the blacksmith’s boy say, “I’d reach up and pluck mangoes or even coconuts.” She watches JoJo listening intently, one hand discreetly feeling between his legs. She slips away, hand over her mouth, waiting till she’s out of earshot before she collapses with laughter.

That evening she serves her husband the meen vevichathu. He nods approvingly after tasting it. It will soon be five years, but she still worries about her cooking.

“As I was making it, Damo came and put his eye to the kitchen window.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “Do you have ghee rice I can take to him tonight?” His expression is like JoJo’s asking for another raw mango.

“But he had one bucket when he came,” she says.

“Oh, did he? Well, then . . .”

“But I can get more.”

He looks pleased. He clears his throat. “Damo’s never gone to the kitchen before. Means he likes you,” he says, looking up with a shy, teasing glance. She sets the newspaper down and heads to the kitchen to prepare the ghee rice.

Yes, I know Damo likes me. He came to greet me on my birthday. I know what he’s thinking. It’s you whose thoughts I never know.

When she returns with the ghee rice, her husband ignores it. With his eyebrows he invites her to sit; he places a tiny cloth bag with a drawstring on the table before her. She pulls out two huge, heavy gold hoop earrings, intricately worked on the outside but hollow within, otherwise their weight would tear through the ear. A filigreed nut hides the post and screw. She stares in disbelief. Is she truly the owner of these kunukku? So that’s why she’s seen the goldsmith trudging back and forth over the last month. All her life she’s admired kunukku. They don’t go into the fleshy part of the ear, but through the curling rim on top where it thins out like the lip of a seashell. She’ll need to pierce the cartilage and then enlarge the hole by packing it with areca leaves until it’s big enough to accept this thick post and screw. Many women wear just the post and screw; on special occasions when they connect the hoops, they project out from the ear like a cupped hand.

Unlike many brides who come with jewelry as part of their dowry, all she has is her wedding ring, the tiny gold minnu that he tied around her neck in the ceremony, and two small gold studs that were hers when her ears were first pierced at the age of five.

She can’t believe he remembered her birthday when he had never done so before. Now she’s the one with no words. Her husband never picks up the paper but as a farmer he’s acutely aware of dates and seasons. In the distance she hears leaves smacking against a tree, the sound of Damo feeding. Not for the first time she wonders if the two giants are in league.

When she can bring herself to meet his gaze, her husband is smiling. He leaves without a word, taking the bucket with him; he’ll sleep on the cot next to Damo while Unni heads home to visit his wife.

When Damo is at Parambil, the ground vibrates with his movements. The sounds of his feeding—the snapping of branches, the crushing of leaves—soothe her. But a few days later, Damodaran returns to the logging camp; like the thamb’ran, he’s happiest when working. In his absence the quiet of Parambil feels exaggerated.

That night, just as she’s drifting off to sleep, her husband appears. She sits up, alarmed, wondering if something is wrong. His frame fills the doorway, blocking out the light. His expression is calm, reassuring. All is well. He holds the tiny oil lamp in one hand and now he extends the other.

She eases free of the sleeping JoJo, takes the proffered hand, and he pulls her to her feet effortlessly. Her fingers remain coddled in the nest of his palm as they step out. This is a new sensation, to be holding hands; neither of them lets go. But where to? They turn into his room.

Suddenly the hammering of her heart is so loud that she’s sure it echoes under the rafters and will wake JoJo. Blood surges into her limbs, as though her body knows what’s about to happen even if her mind is five steps behind. At that moment she cannot know that the nights when he comes silently and leads her away will come to be so precious to her; she doesn’t know that instead of her lips quivering, her body trembling as it does now, instead of her insides turning cold and her legs threatening to buckle, she’ll feel a surge of excitement and pride, a longing when she sees him standing there, his hand extended, wanting her.

But what she feels now is panic. She’s sixteen. She has some notion of what’s supposed to take place, even if that knowledge is inadvertent and from observing God’s other creatures in nature . . . but she’s unprepared. How exactly does it happen? If she could have brought herself to ask that question, whom might she have asked? Even with her mother it would have been so awkward.

He gently guides her to stretch out beside him on his raised teak bed; it doesn’t escape him that she’s frightened, shivering, on the verge of tears, and that her teeth are chattering. In lieu of spoken reassurances, he gathers her to him, one arm under her head, enfolding her, holding her. Nothing more. They lie this way for a long time.

Eventually her breathing slows. The warmth of his body stops her shivering. Is this what the Bible meant? Jacob lay with Leah. David lay with Bathsheba. The night is still. At first, she hears only the hum of the stars. Then a pigeon coos on the roof. She hears the three-note call of the bulbul. A faint scuffle in the muttam and soft padding sounds must be Caesar chasing his tail. Also a repetitive drumming that she cannot place. Then it comes to her: it’s his heartbeat, loud, and almost synchronous with hers.

That low-pitched, muffled thud reassures her, reminds her that she’s in the arms of the man she married almost five years ago. She thinks of the quiet ways he’s attended to her needs, from arranging for the newspaper to escorting her to church for the first time, and now walking her to the boat jetty every Sunday. He expresses his affection indirectly in those acts of caring, in the way he looks at her with pride as she talks to JoJo, or as she reads the paper to him. But on this night during dinner he conveyed his feelings directly but wordlessly through precious earrings that are the sign of a mature woman, a wise wife. This moment could have come at any time in the last few years, but he waited.

After a while, he lifts his head up to look into her face; he raises his eyebrows and tilts his head questioningly. She understands he’s asking if she’s ready. The truth is she doesn’t know. But she knows she trusts him; she has faith that if he brought her here it’s because he knows she’s ready. For once she doesn’t look away; she holds his gaze and peers into his eyes, seeing into his soul for the first time in the four years she has been his wife. She nods.

Lord, I am ready.

He hovers over her, guides her to receive him. She bites her lips at the first sharp pain, muffling the cry that escapes. He pauses and retreats out of concern, but she pulls him down, hiding her face against the valley between his shoulder and chest so that he might not witness her shock, her disbelief at what is happening. Until that moment when he held her hand and led her to this room, they had never touched, not even by accident. Neither holding his hand nor lying in his arms prepared her for this. She feels stupid and ashamed for not knowing, for never imagining that what was supposed to “unfold in its own time,” as Thankamma once said, meant this breach of her body, meant taking him wholly into her insides. She feels betrayed by all the women who withheld this knowledge from her, who might have better prepared her. His extreme gentleness, his consideration for her is unnaturally paired with that first searing pain, then the dull discomfort it gives way to. His repetitive thrusts intensify, the pace quicker. How does this end? What must she do? Just when she fears he will break her, just when she wants to cry out for him to stop, his body stiffens, his back arches, and his expression becomes unrecognizable, pained—as though she inadvertently broke him. She is naïve participant and horrified observer. He tries to stifle an agonal moan but fails . . . and comes to a shuddering stop. He lies on her, spent, a dead weight, his skin wet with perspiration.

Her thoughts are in turmoil, but she rejoices as it dawns on her that she has survived the ordeal. She has an urge to giggle at being pinned like this, by his sudden helplessness. She has not just endured, but it is her body, her contribution to what transpired that has left him robbed of all strength and rooted to her. Belatedly, as she slowly recovers her composure, she recognizes that she has blundered into full womanhood. The seconds tick by, and his weight crushes her so she can barely breathe, yet paradoxically she doesn’t want him to move, doesn’t want her feeling of power, of pride, and of ascendancy over him to end.

In later years, on the rare occasions when his appearance at her door, hand extended, is inconvenient, she never refuses, because in his tender embrace and the inelegant act of what follows, he expresses what he cannot say and what she needs to hear and what she begins to feel now for the first time lying under him: that she’s integral to his world, just as he is her world. She cannot imagine now that the pleasure she sees on his face will be something she too will experience from time to time, or that she’ll unobtrusively find ways to guide him in a manner that pleases her. For now, she’s so full with him she feels he has split her in two, and yet for the first time since her marriage, she is whole, complete.

Gradually, she feels a loosening, a slackening of his grip of her insides, and at last he rolls to one side, just his slab of a thigh over hers. His withdrawal leaves her insides smarting, leaves her exposed, and leaves a void between her legs in a place once sealed to the world. She’s no longer sure of this most intimate part of herself that feels forever altered. There’s wetness trickling down her thigh. She wishes to bathe, and yet, despite the raw, throbbing pain, she is reluctant to leave, relishing this sensation of her husband fast asleep, unconscious next to her, his head nestling against her, a hand draped over her chest, much in the manner of his son.

In the days that follow she feels free to say much more to him at dinner, not just the events of the household, but her thoughts, her feelings, and even her memories, without worrying about his response. Listening is talking for him; there’s an eloquence to this kind of attentiveness; it’s rare, and yet he’s generous with it. He alone amongst all the people she knows uses his two ears and one mouth in that exact proportion. She loves him in a way she didn’t know she could before. Love, she thinks, isn’t ownership, but a sense that where her body once ended, it begins anew in him, extending her reach, her confidence, and her strength. As with anything so rare and precious, it comes with a new anxiety: the fear of losing him, the fear of that heartbeat ceasing. That would mean the end of her.

Parambil settles into its rhythm: mouths to feed, mangoes to pickle, paddy to thresh, Easter, Onam, Christmas . . . a cycle she knows so well and by which she measures her days. To an observer, everything is the same. But after that night, all distance between husband and wife vanishes.

“Lord, thank you . . .” she says in her prayers. “I won’t mention specifics. After all, what don’t you know about my life on earth? But I have a question. When my husband fled the altar four years ago, I heard your voice say to me, ‘I am with you always.’ Did you speak to him too? Did you say, ‘Turn back’? Did you say, ‘She is the one I chose for you’?”

She waits. “Because I am, Lord. I am the one.”