by Anita Nair
‘Go to Manappad. You can use my horse cart to get there,’ he said. ‘You will find peace and quiet. In a few days I will send for you.’
So Sethu and Saadiya went to Manappad, to home their love in a mansion that sat on the sands of a wild sea.
Saadiya was enchanted. How could anything be more perfect, she said again and again. She flung the windows open and the sound of the sea spread itself through the house. There was nothing between the house and the sea except creamy sand. The breeze blew all day.
‘We will have to leave when the summer begins. It will be hot here,’ Sethu said.
‘I don’t care how hot it gets,’ Saadiya dimpled. ‘Just to be able to see the sea …just to see the horizon day after day, what could be more perfect? This is my jannath!’
Sethu’s brow wrinkled at the unfamiliar word. ‘Jannath?’
‘Paradise. That is what it is called in the Holy Koran.’
Sethu saw the pleasure in her eyes and knew pleasure himself. God was good. Long ago, the astrologer who had cast his horoscope had said, ‘This boy is fortune’s child. No matter what, he will always fall on his feet.’
It was true. First there had been Maash. Then the doctor. And now James Raj. Each of them arriving at a point in his life when he didn’t know which way to go. He had to pay a price for their succour, but that was to be expected: nothing in life came without a tag. Not even love. For even Saadiya wore the vestments of difference.
Sethu peeled a plantain for Saadiya. ‘This is all I could find,’ he said, pointing to a hand of plantains that he had managed to buy from a vendor. ‘Tomorrow I will find us all we need. Chairs and a table, utensils for our kitchen and provisions for you to cook with and …’ he paused slyly, ‘a bed.’
When Saadiya coloured, he gleamed.
‘For now we have to settle for this,’ he said, pointing to the palm-leaf mat on which he had spread a thick cotton sheet. ‘This mat will have to be our mattress and for a pillow you can use my arm.’ He smiled.
Her gaze widened and dropped. ‘Come,’ he said, sitting on the floor on their makeshift bed.
She stood, unsure and afraid.
‘Come,’ he said again.
When she didn’t move, he rose and stood before her. ‘What am I to do with you?’ he asked gently, raising her chin with his forefinger. Above her upper lip was a line of sweat. She is frightened, he thought. Lowering his head, he gathered with his mouth the beads of sweat as if they were rice pearls. I have tasted the salt of her skin, he thought with growing pleasure. She trembled. Was it the feel of his mouth on her skin, or the way he stood so that not even a whisper of silk could pass between their bodies?
He felt her lean into him. Then he led her to their bed and drew her down with him.
She lay on her back, stretched out and still, her eyes closed. Sethu gazed at her and swallowed his disquiet—was this the spectre of difference? Then he felt a wave of love exorcize his fear. How beautiful she is, he thought. And she’s mine. My own.
She let him caress her, but when his hand cupped her breast, she sat up. ‘No, you can’t,’ she said, in a voice striated with terror.
‘Why not? I am your …’ Sethu paused, then spoke with as much conviction as he could muster, ‘your husband.’
He saw her look at him. He saw the fear in her eyes dissipate. He took her in his arms again. Slowly, he ran a finger along the line of her neck and traced circles on the skin at the nape of her neck. He felt her body relax against his. He pressed his lips against her forehead. She snuggled even closer to him. Drawing courage from this, he ran his tongue along the curve of her closed eyelids. She shuddered in his arms and as if she couldn’t have enough of this, enough of him, he felt her arms wrap around him. He smiled against her skin.
‘I don’t understand what is happening to me,’ she murmured.
‘Hush, hush,’ he whispered. ‘There is nothing to understand. It is just you and me and how we feel about each other.’
‘Now unbutton my shirt,’ he said.
Her hands shook as she slipped a button through the button-hole.
‘Are we to stay like this all night? Oh Saadiya, how you waste time!’ With a little laugh, he helped her take his shirt off.
He waited for her to protest when his hands fumbled with her clothes. But she lay against him and let him remove, one by one, each piece of her clothing. He unwound the long scarf she had draped around her shoulders. He snapped apart the buttons of her long-sleeved blouse and gently eased open the knot at her waist. Her skirt slithered away from her.
‘What is this?’ Sethu mumbled, when his fingers encountered fabric instead of skin.
Beneath, she wore a long chemise and when Sethu’s fingers lingered at its neckline, she covered his hand with hers.
‘Don’t,’ he whispered.
‘Let me look at you,’ he said and watched with amusement as Saadiya covered her face. She who had never shown her face to a man lay naked before him.
He gave her a sidelong glance, and felt again a tide of love. His. She was his. Her disarrayed hair and clothes showed the extent of his trespassing hands and mouth.
‘Don’t,’ he said, drawing her fingers away from her face. ‘I am your husband. You are mine. There is no need to feel ashamed or even embarrassed.’
As he swooped down to cover her mouth with his, he felt the hard nubs of her nipples graze his. He felt her lips part. The wetness. The glorious liquid wetness in his mouth, on his fingers, gathering him into her. He laughed again in triumph, knowing the extent of her desire.
What does it matter, all these differences between Saadiya and me? What does it matter, for I have this, he thought. How can anything be more perfect than the soft skin of her inner thighs? Or anything be more comforting than to lie as I do, pressed against her back, my breath fanning the back of her neck, my hand cupping her breast, and knowing myself held in the grasp of her love?
How it enfolded him, that concave space between her inner thighs. A nest for him to lay his limpness and seek new strength. Mother. Hope. Comforter. As he felt himself grow and stiffen, that soft space became a wanton creature, urging him on with velvet paws, more, more, more …
As sleep came, he knew a quietness of spirit, an incredible calm, a peace.
So this is content, Sethu found himself thinking in the next few weeks. The thought came to him when he wasn’t expecting it, and that made it so much more precious. It came to him when he raised his eyes from his plate of food and found her devouring him with her eyes. It came to him when he hurt his finger while hammering a nail into the wall and she rushed to his side with tears in her eyes and licked the drops of blood away.
Content. It came to him when they walked on the sands and she collected shells that she later lined on the windowsill of their bedroom. He watched the breeze toss her hair and make her eyes dance.
Content. It played in the songs that filled their home. Only he could have thought of buying such a thing, Saadiya laughed when he brought home a second-hand, or was it third-hand, wind-up gramophone and a stack of records. Only Sethu could have been so easily fooled, Saadiya grumbled when he found the stylus had no needle. Only Sethu could have thought of stripping off a branch of the acacia and taking from it a thorn to place in the stylus, Saadiya said in admiration as the acacia thorn coaxed out the notes from the record.
Content. It grew like the pomegranate sapling he brought home for her because she said that jannath was incomplete without a pomegranate tree.
Content. It flashed a multitude of colours for it was a tri-coloured lantern Sethu found in a junkyard, abandoned by a railway pointsman, or perhaps it had been stolen from one. Sethu cleaned the three pieces of glass, inserted a new wick, and showed Saadiya a new alphabet for togetherness: green when Sethu wanted her, red when she wanted him, yellow when either wanted a pause from loving. In those first weeks, the colour yellow never glowed.
But content is a demanding mistress with a rapacious orifice. As the extraordi
nary settled into routine, Sethu found himself getting restless. ‘Do you think James Raj will send word today?’ he asked every morning.
Saadiya shook her head. Who was James Raj, she wondered. Why did he have to send word?
One day Saadiya asked, ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Sethu looked at her in surprise. ‘My dear girl, if I don’t start earning soon, we’ll starve. My money has almost run out.’
She looked at her feet. ‘Oh,’ she said. Money. They needed money to live. In Arabipatnam, everyone had money and no one ever used the word starve. For the first time in all the days that Saadiya had left home, she knew fear.
‘Don’t look so worried.’ Sethu laughed, pulling her into his arms. ‘I am here. I will take care of you. Don’t you trust me? I’ll look after you better than your Vaapa ever did.’
Saadiya smiled. But it was a smile to mask her uncertainty. What would life throw their way?
James Raj sent word. Sethu presented himself at his home in Nazareth. James Raj looked at Sethu as if he didn’t recognize him. Sethu smiled hesitantly. What could be wrong? Had the doctor managed to dissuade James Raj? What would he and Saadiya do then? The older man shifted in his chair and from his breast pocket he drew a piece of paper. He studied it for a moment and said, ‘Thy way is in the sea, and the path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.’
James Raj waggled his eyebrows. ‘Do you recognize that?’
Sethu looked at the older man in surprise. James Raj, he had heard, professed little faith, least of all in the Bible. But he nodded. ‘Psalm 77.19.’
James Raj beamed. ‘So it is true what they say. The youngest of the kondai sisters said that you know every word of the Bible. She came here secretly, asking me to help you. Their mother is a distant relative of mine. The doctor doesn’t like them visiting me, but Mary Patti doesn’t care what the good doctor thinks. The little kondai is the same. It’s the older ones who are his slaves. But you are not a Christian. How is it then that you know each psalm, every word?’
Sethu allowed himself a smile. He felt relieved. ‘I read it a great many times and I seem to remember almost all of it. I suppose I have a good memory.’
‘Good!’ James Raj stood up. ‘You have a phenomenal memory, my boy. Do you know what that means? I can use your memory instead of ledgers. Everything will become so much simpler!’
‘For the first time in a long time, I feel sure. As if I know what has to be done,’ Sethu told Saadiya, who sat patting a mound of sand into a landscape of hillocks.
She looked up.
They were sitting on the sands by the sea. The twilight bathed the waves in a haze of colour and Sethu felt at peace.
He smiled. ‘You are such a child. And I feel so responsible for you. I was afraid, horribly so. What if I had done wrong in taking you away? What if James Raj’s job hadn’t come through? So many what ifs …Everything scared me.’
‘Why?’ she asked. What could Malik have been scared of? Her incomparable, courageous Malik.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Tell me.’ Her voice was softly persuasive. ‘I might not understand, but tell me.’
Sethu stretched his legs and leaned back on his elbows. He looked at the horizon.
‘Across the seas is Ceylon. This fear I have, it began before I went there,’ Sethu said, his voice already tight with the memory of pain. ‘I told you why I left home, didn’t I? When I met Maash, I thought I had got past the fear of failure. Then it began again, only this time it was because of him. Maash. The man who took me to Ceylon.
‘He was the nicest man I had met. He was kind and generous. He taught me all I knew and he even helped me get past my difficulty with arithmetic. But there was a side to him that I shut myself to. And once I left his home, it faded into an uncertain memory. Sometimes I even wondered if I had imagined it all.
‘I moved away from Colombo and in Kandy I met Balu. Balu was perhaps my first friend. A little later, he was transferred to the Pamban quarantine camp. A year after that, I went there and we were together again. I loved him as if he were my brother.
‘One night we were talking about our growing-up years in Colombo. Balu had been drinking steadily all evening and as he spoke his words grew more and more bitter. Then he said, “All of what I have done in my life I can live with; what I find unbearable is the thought that I sold myself. I was young and didn’t know enough, and the man …” He stopped when he saw the horror in my eyes.
‘“Yes,” he said softly. “The man was persuasive—I’ll be able to help you, he said, I’ll find you a government job—and I thought, I won’t lose anything. All he wants to do is hold me when he shags. He wants to kiss my penis and lick my balls. What does it matter, I thought, as long as I didn’t care for any of it. I wasn’t being violated. The man kept his word. He helped me find this job.”
‘“There was a back issue of a newspaper in the supplies that arrived today,” Balu said after a long silence. “I saw a report that he is dead.”
‘And then Balu said, “He died in his home. He is from Kerala, like you.”
‘I felt my heart sink, Saadiya, I felt as if someone was ripping the veils off my past. It couldn’t be, I told myself. “What was his name?” I asked.
‘Then Balu spoke Maash’s name and I knew horror again. It couldn’t be true. I tried not to think of the nights Maash had crept into my bed. Of how he would put his arm around me and I would hear his fist moving. Up and down, up and down. It has to be the crudest sound ever. The sordidness of it repelled but, like Balu, I let it be. He was just holding me, I thought. I was neither a victim nor a participant. Later, when I was older, I realized that he had been using me. But I shut my mind to the thought.
‘Balu was dredging out the coarseness of that memory; the stench and vileness of it …and I felt something smash into my brain. I was angry with Maash for abusing my trust. I was furious with Balu for making me see Maash for who he truly was. More than anything else, I was angry with myself for having allowed it to continue. How could I have been such a coward? How could I have been so afraid? I knew I had let it be because if I had protested, I would have had nowhere to go.
‘I wasn’t thinking straight, you understand. I looked around wildly. There was a penknife Balu had left on a table. I grabbed it and I remember screaming, “Stop it, stop it!” and then I stabbed him.
‘Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because he tore that last veil off. Then I ran. I ran into the ocean where the fishermen were about to leave and I left with them. I have been running ever since, Saadiya. How can I shrug off my past? There is the sordidness of my association with Maash. There is Balu. I do not know if he is alive or if I am a murderer. And now …’ Sethu paused.
Saadiya leaned forward. ‘And now …’ she prompted.
Sethu looked at her. He wondered if she had understood anything at all of what he had said—the murkiness of his past, his fears and anxieties. She was such a child.
He wanted to tell her how, with James Raj on his side, he felt secure and protected. And he saw that she waited for him to say that it was she who made the difference.
Sethu took her foot in his hand. How small it was, the arch high and curved. He stroked the instep, causing grains of sand to rain and said, ‘Now it doesn’t matter. When I met you, it was as if my life had come full circle. I was cleansed. And this job, it makes me feel that we have a chance.’
Saadiya smiled. Such was the triumph of their love, she thought. Sethu gleaned the smile and understood the measure of that triumph, for it was his as well.
So Sethu went to work and Saadiya cooked, cleaned, stared at the sea, and waited. This was what wives in Arabipatnam did and Saadiya did it easily enough. Till the waiting began to stretch late into the evening and sometimes way past midnight and into the early hours of dawn. In those silent hours, even the sea sounded listless to her. When she looked out of the window, the expanse of the skies and the glaze of the sand hurt her eyes.
; Days stretched into months and Saadiya knew fear again. It wasn’t the fear of poverty. This was the fear of another hunger. To be with her sisters and Ummama, Suleiman and Zuleika. To be with Vaapa. She felt sorrow creep into her mind. For her family she would never see again. For all the pain she had caused. She began to fear that she would have to pay a price for abandoning them. This was to be her punishment, she thought: to be lonely. To be trapped in a space as confined and as short of air as Arabipatnam had been. She wept and then hastily wiped her eyes, hearing the creak of the gate. Sethu would be furious if he knew that she cried for them.
Another night, when she lay by herself in her bed, wondering when Sethu would arrive, she remembered how Ummama had said that one could find solace in the Holy Koran. So the next day, when Sethu returned home, Saadiya asked him if he would bring her a copy.
Sethu felt a weight settle on his brow. Was this the difference the doctor had prophesied? ‘Why do you need one?’ he demanded, setting down his cup of tea. ‘I thought we told each other that we don’t need religion or religious teachings.’
‘This has nothing to do with religion. I have so much time and I do nothing.’
‘In which case, why don’t you do some handiwork? Weave baskets, or make silk flowers, or sew. You could do some embroidery. I can bring you beautiful threads. Something other than read the Koran,’ Sethu said quickly.
‘You are turning this into something else. How many baskets can I weave? How many flowers do I embroider? I am alone all day. I am lonely. Don’t you understand?’ Saadiya snapped.
Sethu looked at her with narrowed eyes. That night she turned the yellow panel of the lantern on. Sethu sighed. Despite all their frequent squabbling, at night all was forgotten and her passion matched his. To punish him with the lexicon he had taught her was cruel. He turned the panel to green. She moved the panel back to yellow. ‘Don’t be cruel, Saadiya,’ he pleaded.