Monsoon Summer (22 page)

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CHAPTER 29
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T
he row with him churned me up badly. I sat brooding about it on the veranda that night and thought about it all through the following day when we had a training session at the Moonstone. After the usual prayers, the midwives sat down on the coir mats, and Maya posed the question, “Who owns your body?”

“You start,” Rosamma encouraged Kartyani, who had barely spoken for two days.

Kartyani glowered at her beautifully patterned feet. “I don't want to talk of such things in a public place.”

“So I'll start.” Rosamma beamed; she was impossible to offend and soaked up knowledge like a sponge. “I have plenty to say. In my village, men own our bodies. As girls we are given away young, often to older men, for sexual pleasure, or we are used as cooks, as beasts of burden.”

“Why complain?” Kartyani picked sullenly at the folds of her skirt. “A man's life is no picnic either.”

“No.” Rosamma waited several moments before continuing. “But let me pose this: who eats first in your house, husband or yourself?”

“He does of course, but that is my choice.”

“Really? And who gets the best food?”

No one bothered to answer.

“Who is the most educated? Sons or daughters?” Rosamma had her pouncing legal face on.

“Sons of course,” Kartyani said. “They have to run the household. What is your point?”

“Here's my point.” Rosamma brandished her finger. “I want a daughter of mine to be educated to live outside the cage, like this person.” She pointed at me. “To be educated, not to pretend to be shy.”

Oh God, I felt like a twenty-one-carat fraud. I did so much shyness pretending at Mangalath, and at the moment, I felt I did nothing but placate Anto.

“A woman should be shy.” Kartyani's small fists bunched. “Shy and obedient, that is the way of the world.”

“You are not shy and obedient. You contradict everything.”

Kartyani joined in the laughter reluctantly.

“So, Miz Kit,” Rosamma asked me, “who owns your body?” which set me back on my hocks.

“As a child,” I said at last, “I think you could say my mother owned it.” Colonized it, I thought, as her little fiefdom, to feed, smack, clean, dress.

“But you are a married woman now?”

“Yes.” I showed them the cheap gold wedding ring Anto had bought in Oxford. “This is how we show we're married. It's like your bindi,” I said, referring to the red spot married women here put between their eyes.

“Children are there?”

“No, but when I have them, my body will belong to them.” My stumbling answer had confused some of the women.

“I think that a woman should—” I had another run at it. “That she—that there are . . . times in a woman's life when she should be brave. It's important to be brave.”

“Otherwise, other people will use her up.” Rosamma, who'd been examining my wedding ring, dropped my finger. “My own mother died at thirty-six years old, worn out with trying to please. Her last words: ‘Thank God for the rest.'”

We all laughed at this, except for Kartyani, who was still looking sour and perplexed, but I found it painful too. I felt I'd lost the easy confidence that came from Anto's love and support, and I hated that. I missed the jokes, childish as they were, the sense of being lucky, lucky, lucky to have found each other, and I wanted him back.

* * *

Letter from Daisy Barker to Kit.

Wickam Farm, April 11th

Dear One,

Your letter gave me great joy. Your first Indian baby delivered! Golly, I'm impressed; so pleased for you too: there's nothing like being really scared of a thing and finding you can do it. Subadra sounds like a wonderful addition to things. We have so much to learn.

You don't give much news about the rest of your life in India. When I lived there, I knew my time would end, but you've traded a Western life for a life in India—much more difficult, and I hope rewarding too. Don't say if none of my beeswax, but I don't suppose anyone has ever solved it: the sense of never being exactly sure where one belongs; one's heart and mind seem a mix of such different things.

Nothing of great moment to report from this end. Tudor has found a local farmer to manage the land. He's moved to London and is doing sterling work on a treatise he is publishing on the archaeology of our Roman remains. House full of usual waifs and strays. Ci Ci, very much the grand dame, has moved into the Bird Room. Flora to London, living in digs and doing a typing course. Your sainted mother is back here, after working for a family in Warminster, I'm happy to say, as we have
two new residents. I'm sad to hear you no longer correspond. In great haste, blackberry and apple jam on stove and about to bubble, will write longer, later . . .

all love,

Daisyxxxxxxx

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CHAPTER 30
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I
'd stuck to my agreement with Appan and spent two weekends at Mangalath. One afternoon, while the servants were asleep, Mariamma took me into Amma's immaculate kitchen and showed me how to make karimeen mappas, Anto's favorite fish curry. We were chopping up garlic, ginger, and green chilies when she turned to me and said in her mocking singsong voice, “So, don't be a stuffed shirt, Kit, tell me some juicy stories from the Home. What are these women like? Salacious details, please.”

She teased me like a sister now. I was no longer the polite foreigner, and when Amma got tricky, which she could even about something as innocent-seeming as our cooking together (in her book, servants were servants, and masters should keep a distance from menial tasks like cooking and cleaning), Mariamma would roll her eyes, lower her voice, wobble her head, and do Amma's voice to a tee: “You can stoop and pick up nothing.”

“Come on.” She brandished her knife in my direction. “Get on with it. More information, please.”

“What are
they
like?” I teased her back. “I assume you're talking about the midwives . . . Well, here's a surprise. They're all different. Some are highly intelligent, very skilled, brilliant, in fact, and some are—how shall I put this?”

“Thick as bricks,” Mariamma supplied.

“I didn't say that.” I was trying not to laugh because I actually liked it so much more when she dropped the politeness veil, it was
such a relief. “I would say, some are confused by what we're saying, and of course, we do have one or two awkward customers, who don't want to change at all.”

I went on, “We had a funny discussion last week.” I told her about Shanta's theory about men menstruating first, and God taking it away from them because they moaned so much. Mariamma laughed and said she was glad not to be a Brahman woman, confined to a dark room at the back of the house each month because you were considered impure. It had stopped one of her friends from going to university.

“Do you think you have made the women you teach happier?” The innocent mockery in her eyes had changed to something more challenging. “Or have you caused family problems?”

“No idea. It depends what you mean by happier.” Now the conversation had veered into seriousness, I wondered if this was a not-so-subtle dig at me and my strangely absent husband. “Some have loved the teaching and the company so much, they dread going back to their villages, where they feel isolated. Others can't wait to see the back of us.” I told her about Kartyani, her sighs, her sulks, her refusal to take part.

“How rude,” she says in the Scottish voice she learned from her governess. “Very clarty behavior.”

She finished chopping and put the garlic into a neat pile, then started peeling the ginger into parchment-thin slices. “So, have you learned anything from them?” She wiped the knife.

“Masses,” I said. I peered at the long list of ingredients in Amma's handwritten recipe book, hoping to steer the conversation away from me. “So, we fry the garlic and ginger in oil, then what?”

“What have you learned?” she insisted.

I stopped and thought for a while, and then a new feeling bubbled up from nowhere, something like exhilaration or pride, or maybe it was just belonging, that loosened my tongue. “Oh, I don't know . . . so much: to think with my fingers, how to watch, how to
wait. I'm still scared but nothing like as much as I was. How to shut up.” I stopped suddenly. This was exactly what I should be doing. I liked Mariamma, but I didn't trust her not to tell the others.

“Show me something you've learned,” Mariamma said with a glint in her eye. At moments like this I could see why Anto called her the family bossy boots. My mind raced through several possibilities. One that would emphasize my role as observer. Nothing to frighten the horses.

“Well, you know, last week, a girl came in whose labor was very slow, and Rosamma, one of the women, taught me the circular massage.”

Mariamma slid the rest of the pearl fish into the bubbling liquid. She washed her hands and lay down on the floor. “No one will see us, servants asleep, Amma is out.” I hesitated, then closed the door.

“The pressure is like this.” I pressed gently on her abdomen. “You do it clockwise.” I swept my hands to the right. “And then counterclockwise. It relaxes the mother and helps the midwife feel the baby. ‘God is the doer,' Rosamma, the midwife, told me, ‘the hands are mine.'”

It suddenly seemed a good idea to introduce a religious element into the discussion.

“God is the doer, the hands are mine,” Mariamma murmured Her plump, round face was beaming but then thoughtful, as if another bit of the jigsaw had fallen into place.

“Your own midwife must have done something like this,” I said, feeling stupid.

“Yes,” she admitted, “but we've only ever used one midwife. She is properly trained, we all trust her, but good to know about these other things,” she ended vaguely.

She stood up, washed her hands, and went to stir the curry, which had come to the boil.

“And you must have to touch them?” she asked, her back turned
to me. “I mean . . . you know . . . in their private parts? It's so intimate.” She added a sprinkle of salt. “So . . .” Her shoulders hunched as she searched for a word to describe the squalor of it. “So odd.”

I felt a flash of impatience. This was life we were talking about. Why make the source of it such a taboo?

“It's thrilling to watch a child being born,” I said.

“And even more thrilling to have one,” she said pointedly.

Pathrose and Kuttan rescued me. If they noticed the strange atmosphere, they didn't show it as they smiled and sniffed appreciatively at the fish curry. Mariamma, after rapping out instructions about when it should be taken off and what served with it, put a protective arm around me. She led me into the garden, to a bench underneath a banana tree.

When we were seated she said, “I like listening to you talk about your work.” She patted my arm reassuringly. “I think you're brave.”

“No,” I said, “not brave at all.”

“Hm.” There was still something watchful and guarded about Mariamma's expression. “I'm happy for you, but I must give you some serious advice.” Her eyes flickered towards the house. “You've been married over a year. Don't wait too long to have your own babies; we're all very worried about you.”

* * *

On the following Friday when I arrived at Mangalath, Amma came rushing towards me through the courtyard like a little steam train. I assumed she was angry, but when she stopped, I saw she was beaming.

“Kittykutty, Kittykutty,” she said—the first time she'd ever added this endearment to my name—“we've had a telegram from Anto. He's coming home soon, God willing.” Her voice trembled, her eyes were full of tears.

“It's for you too.” She watched me while I read the dog-eared telegram, “Job offer from university. Home soonest, love Anto,”
and
embraced me properly for the first time, murmuring, “Thank God, thank God.” I cried too, feeling a flooding relief, as if some vital stability had been restored, not just to me but to the house. Now Amma would stop blaming me for his absence, he'd have a proper job, we'd get our first proper home together and be happy again. Life is never that simple, of course, but on that night it felt that way.

We feasted, and Appan, who was home, drank more whisky than usual before dinner, and the whole house floated on a cloud of relief and delight.

“We'll have a party to celebrate,” Amma decided when we were drinking tea on the veranda. She patted my arm. The grumpy vertical line had gone between her eyes, and she looked a decade younger. “We'll ask Thresiamma, Ammamma, Sadji, Aby.” Amma wrote the names down on a list. Appan mock-groaned. He'd been in Delhi—another conference on the shaping of India's new laws—and come home with a mountain of work to do.

After supper, when Father Christopher arrived to say a special mass of thanks, I knelt in the chapel and felt, for the first time in a long time, profoundly happy, a soft billowing rising inside me. It wasn't God who brought it to me—or if it was, I was not aware of it. It was Anto's coming back, and my having work to do that fulfilled me, and strangely, having Amma on one side of me, Mariamma on the other, Theresa beside her, and hearing Appan's sturdily male “Most grievous fault!”
as he thumped his breast. My perspective changed as I looked around me at the samplers I'd watched Amma stitching, the altar made from the deck of an ancestor's spice boat, the smell of the incense, the lap of the lagoon outside, the melodious call of the koyal's
koo . . . ooo . . . oo
in the jackfruit tree outside. All this no longer felt like a foreign postcard to me. Tonight I felt anchored in a way I wasn't used to feeling, and it came to me that home was not, in the end, a place or a country, but something much deeper and more lasting.