“I’m so happy for Raffie too.” She dabbed at her eyes. “He was miserable when you were gone.”
We caught up with the family gossip, what Mariamma calls vayadi, literally, flapping mouth. Theresa, she said, had graduated top of her class and was becoming a right little madam. Ponnamma was growing more and more nutty. Recently she had bellowed across the table at Amma, “Do you miss sex, daughter? I do!” which had caused Appan to choke on his thoran. “You know what she’s like,” Mariamma continued, enjoying my laughter. “She says, ‘Now I am old, I never apologize for being a nuisance, I am a nuisance!’”
I wanted to ask her about Appan and whether he was angry, but I couldn’t find the words yet and was grateful to Mariamma for keeping things light.
That night there was a flamboyant sunset—peach and vermilion flames in the sky—and I sat in the courtyard (I never used the veranda anymore) and watched it dumbfounded, thinking of all the things I’d taken for granted. When Anto came home, I made him a gin and tonic the way he likes it, with a slice of lime.
After Kamalam bathed Raffie, he came and of his own accord sat on my knee. His skin was warm, his hair damp. He said, “You were a bad girl, Mummy, for being away for so long.”
He slept in my arms.
* * *
Mariamma came again a couple of days later. She slipped her feet out of her slippers, sat next to me, and we chatted about normal things.
She was up to her neck in preparations for the festival of Onam, the biggest feast of the year in South India and at Mangalath. I’d enjoyed it last year, but this year, with forty-four close relatives invited, I wanted to run for the hills.
“Oh my God, look at all these things I must do now.” Mariamma, indignant and happy, pulled the master list from her handbag. “Banana leaves, chickens, fifty coconuts, rice, pearl fish, yogurt, lentils. New cricket and Ping-Pong bats for the children, new pillowcases, new glasses. Such a carry-on.”
Raffie, who was sucking his thumb while leaning against my knee, was already excited about Onam. When Anto got home from work, they burbled on about playing cricket with his cousins, dressing up as tigers, the usual family boat race.
“Do you think you can make it?” Anto asked me gently.
“Not sure,” I said. “I’ll think about it, but you must go,” I added, manufacturing a smile when I was still frightened of every knock on the door.
“Do you know why we celebrate Onam every year?” Anto asked. Raffie was sitting on his knee now. “It marks the ancient King Mahabali’s return from Patala, the underworld. The story goes that he loved Cochin so much, he had to come back.”
Raffie took his thumb out of his mouth, “I’m going to be a tiger!” He barred his milk teeth.
“Noooo!” Anto shrank back in mock terror, then put him back on his knee. “But do you really know why we’re going to Mangalath?”
“Sweets,” shouted Raffie. “Cricket?”
“Harvest, home, family ties.” Anto flicked his eyes towards me.
“Here endeth the lesson,” I said, and even to me my voice sounded bitchy. I walked out of the room and sat on a bench in the courtyard, trying not to cry.
* * *
“Appan and Amma had a wee ding-dong about the Onam food last week.” Mariamma was back again with more Mangalath snippets. “As you know, the veggie dish is traditional, but Appan wants to offer chicken and prawn dishes as well. “ ‘Come on, woman!’” Mariamma’s voice deepened. “’Times change. Guests don’t want to eat food like cattle.’”
“Amma got very huffy,” Mariamma continued in the same semidelighted whisper. “ ‘Mundan! Idiot,’ she said quite audibly. Appan rushed out out of his study. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’ Amma smiled like this,” Mariamma mimicked her rictus smile, “and said, ‘No, husband, nothing at all.’ She said she would be going into the garden and might be gone for some time.”
Mariamma took a bite of her pastry, still chuckling. After a silence I said, “It’s been kind of you to come every day like this.”
“You are my sister.” She brushed the crumbs from her skirt. “I missed you badly while you were away. I thought about you every single day; my heart was breaking.”
She got down on her knees and clasped both her hands around my knees.
“Come back for the feast. Please. Appan and Amma really want it.”
“They do?” I could hardly hide my surprise. “I thought it would be less awkward if I stayed here.”
Before she’d left me that night, Amma had stabbed her finger in my direction and said, with her fiercest look, “You must never tell anyone about this!” meaning the bribe, meaning her intervention. Since my release, I’d imagined I’d become her guilty secret.
“No!” Mariamma said vigorously, big brown eyes trained on mine. “They want you home.”
Mariamma dropped a parcel into my lap. “You may wear it, if you decide to come,” she wheedled, her head on one side.
Later, I opened the parcel. Inside was a brand-new beautiful white-and-gold sari. The perfect symbol of a spotless Indian wife. I gazed at it, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
- CHAPTER 64 -
In the end I went, reluctantly, and mostly to please Anto, secretly dreading the ten days of enforced jollity ahead. After a few tries, and some help from Kamalam, I managed to put on the new sari Mariamma had so thoughtfully provided, feeling inside that sackcloth and ashes might be more the ticket.
Mangalath was in its party clothes when we arrived: the sky almost artificially blue, the courtyard covered in the pookalum: a giant, brilliantly colored carpet of roses and marigolds, orchids and lotus blossoms, bursting with color and light—the everyday miracles I was still too battered to appreciate.
When he saw all the flowers, Raffie shouted, “Zippity-doo-dah!” his favorite new word. He struggled to get out of the car and raced towards the house.
“Are you all right?” Anto touched my hand.
“Fine,” I said, taking a deep breath. “The jailbird returns.”
“Stop it.” He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ears. “Half of them won’t know, the other half will, in great Anglophile tradition, never mention it again, so stick with me, kid. You look beautiful, by the way. Really beautiful. How do you feel?”
“Physically fine,” I said. In the past few weeks I’d felt that midterm-pregnancy energy starting to flow into my bones, my hair, my skin, which had lost its pallor. “Mentally, a bit like the wrong sort of prodigal daughter.”
“You’ll be fine,” he whispered. “It’s our baby’s first trip here.”
Walking towards the house, I saw Amma, standing where she’d been on the first day I met her, between the gold lions, wearing an almost identical white-and-gold sari. My heart began to thump. Given all that we knew about each other now, it felt presumptuous to be wearing the same uniform. She took both my hands in hers, looked at me for several fraught seconds, and then talked over my head to Anto, as she probably always would.
“I’m very glad you came,” she said. “We were worried you wouldn’t.” As we walked up the petal-strewn path towards the house, she rested her hand on the small of my back.
“Should I speak to Appan before joining in?” I said. A trip to the headmaster’s study felt like the least I could do.
“Only if he wants to speak to you,” she whispered quickly. An army of small children were racing down the steps to claim their youngest cousin. “And don’t worry too much. He’s forgiven me for taking the money. A beautiful bunch of orchids came today.” She squeezed my arm. “We did what was necessary; it’s over now,” she added firmly.
* * *
Anto was right: no one, on that first day, said a word about prison, although I held myself in readiness and felt stiff with nervous tension at the end of it, and very much aware of Appan: elegant, gracious, commanding, circulating, checking dri
nks, patting children’s heads, roaring with laughter at jokes. When he saw me, he dipped his head in my direction and said, “Welcome.”
But on our fourth day there, I got up in the middle of night, jangled and unhappy and unable to sleep. Not wanting to wake Anto, I walked downstairs barefoot and went into the family prayer room, where a candle burning in a rose-colored glass jar shed a dim warm light over the Virgin Mary. When my eyes had adjusted, I saw a man huddled in the corner of the room praying. He was wearing loose pajamas and was barefoot.
“Appan.” I started to back away. “I’m so sorry . . . I . . .”
“Kit.” He looked at me. “Are you all right?”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you; I’m going back to bed.”
“Don’t go.” He hauled himself onto the pew with some difficulty. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
“You have?” I sat tensely at the end of the pew, waiting for the recitation of my sins I was sure would follow. He was staring at me.
“You were brave to come back like this. I mean to Mangalath with the whole tribe here.” I watched the candle flame flicker.
I told him it had been Anto’s idea.
“And do you always do everything your husband wants?”
“In this instance, yes. He’s been amazing.”
I heard a sad snort. “In what way?” He shifted on the pew, making it creak like a ship’s bows.
“Loyal,” I said at last. “Kind. I feel like the truest version of myself with him.”
I saw his head bow. “I let him down,” he muttered. He glanced at me quickly. “Do you think he will ever forgive me?”
It was quiet enough in the chapel to hear the faint sizzle of the candle burning, his bare feet brushing against stone.
“He loves his family,” I stalled, reluctant to talk for Anto. “And,” I went on after a long pause, “I think we all get it wrong differently. Look at me.”
He gave me a strained, considering look, the look I imagined had terrorized many prisoners in the dock.
“You erred on the side of wanting to help,” he said at last. “Amma has explained your work to me, the good things your patients said about you. She says that you’re going to finish your qualification. When you do, I’m going to send some money to the Home. A penance maybe.”
“A penance!” I gaped at him and shook my head. “I wasn’t even sure I could come back here.”
“You were punished harshly,” he said. “I knew that all along, and all I’m giving is a few rupees, too late, probably. If I’d been another kind of lawyer, I would have got you off, but I couldn’t. I’ve lived my whole life with certain rules and I found I couldn’t break them, so what I’ve decided to do is donate the same money as the bribe, and then we must never talk about it again.”
He shivered as if he had reached the end of some long ordeal, and then he looked up at the window.
“This is a creepy time of night, no?” He wrapped his shawl around himself. “The veils are at their thinnest. I can almost imagine King Mahabali, creeping back from the underworld.”
It took awhile for his words to sink in. I was still experiencing a kind of flooding relief.
“What a discovery the world must have been,” Appan murmured. I followed his gaze towards the window. The candle had gone out but a soft streak of light was brightening the stained-glass window; I could hear the clucking of birds.
“Thank you for talking to me,” I said. “I was so frightened of coming back.”
“Families are frightening. They mean too much. You look tired, daughter. You need rest.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m going to go upstairs now and get some sleep.”
* * *
I slept for twelve hours straight. It was like a tight hat coming off my head. And later, when night was falling and the prawns and the chickens were sending out tantalizing messages from the kitchen, forty-three members of the Thekkeden family played cricket on the lawn behind the house. I could hear Raffie’s excited voice breaking through the hubble-bubble of sound. The game lasted until it was too dark to see, and then the batsmen played with Davy lamps on their heads, with fireflies flitting in the dark, shouts and laughter. Appan (two whiskies to the wind) was an erratic fielder, his Tibetan mastiff barking and leaping for stray balls. Mariamma ran stoutly between the trees. Anto bowled athletically, doing his Sunil Gavaskar impersonation. I stayed on the dark fringes of the fielding, where the lawn dissolved into darkening trees, and beyond I saw birds skimming down across the silver backwater.
When it got too dark to play, Amma, proud and mocking, stood framed in light on the veranda watching us. She rang the bell.
“Dinner everyone. Don’t let it get cold!”
After dinner, the youngest cousins got into their nightclothes and lay in piles on charpoys on the veranda. Boxes of old cinema film were unpacked. Mariamma, bossy older sister, told Anto to help put the screen up: “Not there! There, higher! No, lower than that.” It was time, she said, in a bad attempt at a Barnum and Bailey accent, for “The Thekkeden Motion Picture Showee.”
The film began with a few babies toddling drunkenly onto the screen, herded by a jolly-looking mother, who waved at the camera.
“That’s me,” shouted Ponnamma, who had drunk more than her fair share of ginger wine and whom I had avoided all day. “What a minx I was!”
Then Appan, mustached and dapper in his plus fours, and Amma, his radiant bride, on a honeymoon holiday in Madras.
“Don’t you dare go to sleep.” Mariamma shook Raffie awake. “Wait for your Daddy.”
Raffie’s hair was still damp from his bath. He put my arm around him.
Anto, who’d disappeared into the kitchen for drinks, came back and sat beside me. He was barefoot and carrying a bowl of golden banana chips. He handed me a weak whisky and soda.
A few seconds later, a jerky black-and-white image of him bloomed into life on the screen. He was about fifteen, messing around and doing pretend cricket shots for the camera. In the next shot he was wearing the same tweed jacket I’d met him in, the one with leather patches on the elbows, and he looked so young and sweet and skinny and undefended, my heart leapt with sorrow for him. Behind him was the ocean liner that would shortly take him away from all this, and the whole of the wild sea ahead.
There were wolf whistles, catcalls. Ponnamma pinched him. “Handsome devil!”
“Spiffing suit, what, Uncle Anto?” Thaddeus, one of the younger cousins, said. “The Playboy of the Western World.”
I was thinking as I joined in the laughter what a lot he had made of his life: how resilient he’d been, and brave. I felt the blaze of the new baby inside me. I’d started to talk to it now, to feel sure of its heart beating. I made up my mind to tell Amma tomorrow, which of course meant everyone—assuming Mariamma hadn’t already. “In the strictest confidence of course!”
Appan, staring at the screen, groaned and sank down in his chair. Amma patted his hand. And then, to my surprise, there was me. I hadn’t been aware of being filmed at the time. Me in the blue dress, smiling and shaking Amma’s hand, looking scared out of my wits, as well I might, faced with the great roiling mass of contradictions, horrors, and wonders ahead.
After the film, Mariamma and I helped to push sleepy children upstairs. One of the toddlers was spark out, draped like a shawl over Mariamma’s shoulder. Raffie said he wanted to sleep in the cousins’ room; otherwise he would dream about black spiders.
It was late by the time we’d left the cousins in a murmuring bundle in the spare room. Anto said, “Let’s go for a walk in the garden.”
We went down the steps towards the summerhouse and sat on a bench overlooking the water. The air was warm on my face. It was spicy and sweet from the flowers. I told him about my conversation with Appan, and as I watched his face change and grow hopeful as he absorbed the news, I felt the
pure flame of my love for him again.
The water, lightly touched with gold from an almost full moon, grew black and crinkly towards the distant shore. From the temple across the lake, where Onam was in full swing, we could hear the pulsing of drums, the sound echoed and added to in villages for miles around. The priests had lit a bonfire. Its flames made a million sparks in the sky, in all-night celebration for the crops that didn’t fail.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First I must thank Rema Tharakan for her constant stream of emails and her advice and encouragement with this book. Rema and her husband, Anthony, were fantastic hosts and guides during my research trip to Kerala.
Midwife Rachel Walker and her obstetrician husband, Dr. David Walker, gave generous guidance on midwifery matters, as did Jane Ash, Dr. Suhas Choudhari, Joan Liburn, and Gabrielle Allen from Guys and St. Thomas’ Charity. Any mistakes are mine.
I’m indebted to numerous books on Indian history, Nasrani customs and climate, particularly Diane Smith’s fascinating, Birthing with Dignity, and Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon. Emma Jolly, from Genealogic, dug out some fascinating facts.
Special thanks to Delia and Caroline for their inspiration and support and for my book club friends for making me laugh and opening my eyes to a wide range of books.
Many thanks to my editor, Heather Lazare, for all her help and to Clare Alexander for being simply the best.
Finally, more thanks than I can express to Richard for his advice, his generosity, and good humor during many readings of this book.
Touchstone Reading Group Guide
MONSOON SUMMER
Julia Gregson
This reading group guide for Monsoon Summer includes an introduction, discussion questions, and a Q&A with author Julia Gregson. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Monsoon Summer Page 42